y 191

Before and After The Art of Biblical Narrative

Steven Weitzman

A bs t r a c t
What has become of the so-called literary approach to the Bible since Robert Alter
published The Art of Biblical Narrative in 1981? What gave rise to this
approach in the first place? How has it been influenced by recent trends in biblical
studies and literary scholarship? And what is its future, both in general and as part
of the particular project that Prooftexts represents? The essay addresses these
questions as a way of introducing what is at stake in the present volume.

D uring the 1980s, many biblical scholars saw themselves as participating in

an important paradigm shift. It seems we have reached a turning point in
the history of criticism, wrote Robert Alter and Frank Kermode in referee
ence to the change underway.1 Earlier biblical scholarship had diverted attention
from biblical literature to the reality anterior to the textthe Bibles sources, its
authorship, the events and institutions that lie behind it. Scholars like those who
contributed to Alter and Kermodes The Literary Guide to the Bible were seeking to
teach their audience how to read and appreciate the Bible itself by training attente
tion on its artfulnesshow it orchestrates sound, repetition, dialogue, allusion,
and ambiguity to generate meaning and effect.
This was not the first time that biblical scholarship had taken such a turn.
Interest in the Bible as literature has a long intellectual pedigree that can be
traced back to the eighteenth century, which itself looked back to the ancient
Greek scholar Longinus as an antecedent. 2 The phrase the Bible as literature
itself originated in the nineteenth century, coined by Matthew Arnold, who

PROOFTEXTS 27 (2007): 191210. Copyright 2007 by Prooftexts Ltd.

192 y Steven Weitzman

argued that no one knows the truth about the Bible who does not know how to
enjoy the Bible.3 By the end of that century, English readers had the benefit of
Richard Moultons The Literary Study of the Bible, published in 1895 and reprinted
until 1935, that aimed to describe the varied literary forms of the Bible, and also
of translations and anthologies that accentuated the Bibles eloquence or beauty,
such as Passages of the Bible Chosen for the Literary Beauty and Interest, published by
the folklorist James Frazier in 1909.4 Decades before The Art of Biblical Narrative,
Jewish scholarsMichael Heilprin, Simon Bernfeld, Morris Jastrow, Jr, and of
course Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, not to mention medieval and early
modern precursorsalso began to classify biblical texts according to genre or to
seek to identify its aesthetic properties.5 However newfangled it seemed in the
1980s, the literary approach to the Bible, the attempt to understand it as a work
of aesthetic and not just religious or historical value, is as old as most other
methods of biblical study.
The rekindling of interest in this topic in the 1970s and 1980s was a response
to far more recent academic trends, however. One important precipitant was the
lingering influence of the New Criticism that was so dominant in literary scholarse
ship in the mid century.6 That approach had gone out fashion by the 1960s, of
course, but its influence continued in more subtle ways, and some of the trends that
displaced it had the effect of reinforcing interest in the Bible as literature: the
impact on American scholarship of Russian formalism, structuralism and semioe
otics, the linguistic turn in historiography and other fields that helped to dissemine
nate the influence of literary analysis beyond English departments, and the
postcritical turn in biblical exegesis that sought to use the methods of modern
critical scholarship to rehabilitate traditional sources like the Bible and rabbinic
literature as sources for contemporary religious and philosophical thought.
One of the most influential figures in the emergence of the latter trend was
Moshe Greenberg, and his writing reveals what could be at stake for Jewish
scholars in particular by cultivating this approach to the Bible. In Can Modern
Biblical Scholarship Have a Jewish Character?, an essay published in 1982/83,
Greenberg celebrated the recent appearance of Jewish scholars open to the
methods and discoveries of modern secular scholarship but also animated by a
sense of mission.7 The scholarship Greenberg was envisioning was free of dogmate
 Before and After The Art of Biblical Narrative y 193

tism and open to innovation and new historical or comparative evidence, but it
was also characterized by respect for the text in hand and the wealth of meanings
to be found within it, and by a sense of commitment to a community, to fellow
Jews eager to understand the scriptures message to them. Greenberg recognized
the inherent tension between a historicalcontextual approach to the Bible and a
religiously engaged reading of it, but he found in the literary study of the Bible,
defined by Greenberg in another essay as the synthesizing task of understanding
the text in hand as a coherent artifact, one way to bridge between them, for it
bracketed historical questions that left the Bible appearing obsolete in the modern
age while casting the search for meaning in the finished biblical text as a field of
legitimate academic study.8 Attending to the artfulness of biblical literature
(along with its interpretive history) was in Greenbergs view one of the ways that
scholars committed to secular methodology could nonetheless help resuscitate the
Bibles relevance for their communities.
I am not suggesting that all Jewish biblical scholars who tried to understand
the literary workings of the Bible were drawn to it by the same agenda that motive
vated Greenberg. I cite his example, rather, to underscore the timeliness of this
approach in the 1970s and 1980s, the way it addressed questions and concerns
specific to a particular generation of scholarship. For some, its chief appeal was
that it linked biblical study with literary theory at a time when the latter was a
source of considerable cultural capital. For others, it offered a way to integrate
biblical studies with Jewish interpretive tradition, a synthesis of particular appeal
for Jewish biblical scholars seeking a place for themselves in academic settings
outside of historically Jewish institutions like Brandeis and the Jewish Theologie
ical Seminary.
Recognizing how timely this approach was in the 1970s and 1980s brings us
to the questions that motivate the present volume of Prooftexts: how timely is the
literary approach to the Bible today? Can it transcend the particular historical and
cultural circumstances that fostered interest in it in the 1970s and 1980s? Taking
the vital signs of a particular interpretive approach is not easy to do, but academic
culture is different today from what it was twenty-five years ago, and it is an open
question whether the literary study of the Bible can survive the change. Work in
this vein continues to this day in America, Israel, and Europe, but there are also
194 y Steven Weitzman

indicators of a marked decline in the approachs capacity to generate first-rate

work. Consider two examples that I could not help but notice given the particular
vantage point from which I happen to see things.
In 1985, Indiana University Press launched a new monograph series under
the editorship of Robert Polzin and Herb Marks devoted to the literary study of
the Bible, mostly the Hebrew Bible. The twenty-five volumes in the series encompe
pass a wide variety of interpretive approachessome, like Alter, focused on the
Bibles literary form; others concentrated on its interpretive history or even revived
a kind of theological approachbut what connects most of them, in the words of
Marks, is their engagement in immanent rather than transcendental strategies
of reading, their focus on the text itself rather than on some reality beyond it.
The first book in the series, Meir Sternbergs The Poetics of Biblical Narrative,
published in 1985, was by far the best seller, selling some 1,500 copies in cloth
and nearly 7,000 copies in paperback. Mieke Bals Lethal Love also found a large
audience, but by the 1990s the series was struggling to find an audience and had
started to become a financial drain. Since the end of that decade, this series has
been far less active. Sternberg did publish another book for it in 1999, Hebrews
Between Cultures, an effort to bridge his earlier work on the poetics of biblical
narrative and the study of identity and otherness, but it did not register with
scholars in the way his Poetics did, and the series has been largely dormant since
then. As I write this, it has published only one other book since Sternbergs,
Robert Kawashimas Biblical Narrative and the Death of the Rhapsode. A major
reason for the decline is financialthe press began losing significant money on
most of the publications, leading it to suspend the series for a while and then
restricting the number of books that could come out in any given yearand that
may say more about the economics of academic publishing or the marginalization
of literary studies in general than about the direction of biblical studies in particue
ular; in fact, at the time of the series suspension, Marks reports, it had several
promising books under contract. It is not the series suspension, I would argue,
but the recent effort to revive it that evidences how scholarly interests have
changed. The series has only one book in the pipeline, and even it does not represe
sent the kind of study exemplified by Alters The Art of Biblical Narrative, focusing
not on the Bible itself but on its interpretation in mystical tradition.
 Before and After The Art of Biblical Narrative y 195

Prooftexts itself may reflect the same shift. It was engaged by this approach
from the very beginning, when its first volume, published in 1981, featured two
review essays on the topic by Michael Fishbane and Edward Greenstein, along
with an essay by James Kugel critical of the very idea of treating the Bible as literae
ature. The journals role in promoting the literary approach to the Bible seems to
have been both deliberate and accidental at the same time. Deliberate because, as
recalled by Greenstein (a biblical scholar among the founding members of the
journal), the editors consciously sought to include the Hebrew Bible as part of
Jewish literary history, and, beyond that, to model a more literary mode of scholae
arly discourse distinct from the dry technical rhetoric of conventional biblical
scholarship at the time. It was accidental because the visibility of biblical studies
in the journalbiblical studies often appeared first in volumes not devoted to a
particular themewas to some extent the accidental by-product of the Bibles
chronological priority, giving its analysis more prominence in Prooftexts than its
editors intended. Be that as it may, Prooftexts provided an important venue
through which Jewish biblical scholars could negotiate between their various
intellectual interests by participating in biblical studies, literary studies, and
Jewish studies at the same time.
Some twenty-five years later, Prooftexts itself is going strong, but it is my
impression that it is not drawing the kind of biblical scholarship that it once did.
That might be, as editors like David Roskies and Ed Greenstein suggest, because
the journal has been less proactive in soliciting essays in this area over the past ten
years (Greensteins departure from the editorial board in 1989 was itself a turning
point in the journals relationship to biblical studies). The current editorial board
of Prooftexts includes, as a distinct minority, biblical scholars such as myself, but
my own scholarship also reflects the very trend to which I am referring, as I pay
more attention to historical context and early postbiblical literature than was
characteristic of scholars like Alter and Sternberg.
The declining interest in this way of reading the Bible will probably not come
as a surprise to readers familiar with how the practice of literary interpretation has
changed in the last twenty to thirty years, an era that saw the crystallization of
deconstruction and other subversive reading strategies that sought to emphasize the
elusiveness, ruptures, and self-contradictions of literary language or of the self in its
196 y Steven Weitzman

relationship to language; the impact of reception theory that shifted the focus from
the text and its capacity to shape interpretation to readers and their importation of
meaning into the text; the rising dominance of a cultural studies paradigm that
expanded interpretations purview from certain canonical texts privileged by their
aesthetic merits to a broader array of discourse and modes of signification; ideologice
cally committed perspectives for which literary analysis became a vehicle for
critique; and other trends conventionally labeled as theory. Close reading did not
die outdeconstructionists like Barbara Johnson proved brilliant practitioners even
as they led in new directionsbut close reading of the sort practiced by Alter,
reading that assigned to texts a large measure of control over their meaning and saw
as its chief objective the elucidation of their artistic design, stopped engaging many
scholars who had come to see that way of reading as nave or suspect.
All this has to be balanced against the incredible, and continuing, success of
Alters work. By the most conventional measuresnumber of books sold, favorable
reviews, frequency of citationit is hard to imagine a more successful academic
book than Alters The Art of Biblical Narrative. As we have noted, Alter was not the
only participant in the turn he and Kermode describe in the Literary Guideprecurse
sors in the preceding few decades include Erich Auerbach, Luis Alonso-Schokel,
Meir Weiss, Samuel Sandmel, J. P. Fokkelman, Meir Sternberg, Menakhem Perry
(who contributes to this volume), Shimon Bar-Efrat, Uriel Simon, Jacob Licht,
James Ackerman, and many others. The work of the Israeli scholars Sternberg and
Perry was particularly ground-breaking, drawing on a sophisticated understanding
of narrative poetics to bring real clarity to the analysis of biblical narrative. While
Sternbergs The Poetics of Biblical Narrative appeared in English after The Art of
Biblical Narrative, it draws on earlier work published in Hebrew, and Alter acknowlee
edges the work of Sternberg and Perry, along with Erich Auberbachs Mimesis, as
important predecessors. But with the exception of Auerbach, Alters work clearly
resonated in a way no earlier study had done for many decades. Gracefully and
accessibly written in a way that transcends the difference between scholarly and
popular writing, The Art of Biblical Narrative has sold an estimated 70,000 copies to
date, an astounding number for an academic book.
But there were dissenters from the beginning, not just from those committed
to conventional biblical scholarship of the sort that Alter was defining himself
 Before and After The Art of Biblical Narrative y 197

against, but from those seeking to position themselves on the cutting edge of the
field. In a certain sense, biblical studies since Alters work has taken the same
linguistic turn that many other disciples have followed, losing confidence in its
ability to reconstruct the reality behind the biblical text, becoming more alert to its
fictive elements; but it has also grown more resistant to the kind of approach that
Alter exemplifies, a resistance we can briefly illustrate by looking at some of the
scholarly reviews that Alters work garnered between 1981 and 1991. What is releve
vant about these reviews is not whether their criticisms are valid but their rejection
of the very assumptions on which Alters approach was premised, a stance rooted in
a larger shift in how literary interpretation itself was conceptualized.
The first volume of Prooftexts contains one of the earliest of these critiques, a
review essay by James Kugel, one of the two members of the journals editorial
board specializing in biblical studies.9 Although writing before the publication of
The Art of Biblical Narrative, Kugel had Alters earlier work in mind when
critiquing the attempt to treat the Bible as a work of literature. The problem with
literary readings of the Bible, Kugel argues, is that they project onto the text
generic categories (poetry, comedy, etc.) and aesthetic properties (ambiguity,
irony) from their own age that are alien to the culture that produced the Bible.
Reading the Bible in this way can be enriching, Kugel acknowledges, but only in
the way that midrash is enriching; one should not mistake it for a description of
what the Bible is actually doing. Kugels own work suggests that the true charae
acter of biblical discourse can be understood by the scholar to some degree (otherwe
wise, how would we know that our generic categories do not fit the biblical
evidence), but he argues that the nature of that discourse is obscured, not illumine
nated, by a literary approach that unwittingly distorts the evidence by finding
verbal patterns, inter-textual connections, and unexpressed character motives that
are not actually there in the biblical text. Kugels own approach, which he pursued
in subsequent studies, calls for a greater awareness of the history of reading that
can, among other lessons, help expose the disjunction between what the Bible
actually is and how the literary critic imagines it.
Reflected in Kugels critique is the emergent influence on literary study of
reception-history and reader-response oriented modes of literary analysis that
sought to refocus literary study from how literature is produced and what its
198 y Steven Weitzman

authors intend to how texts are experienced by readers, ideal or actual.10 Somewe
where in its prehistory, emerging as a major influence on literary scholarship in
the late 1960s, is the work of reception theorists such as Hans Robert Jauss, but a
more direct influence is the scholarship of Brevard Childs, who in his commente
tary on Exodus incorporated precritical interpretations of the Bible alongside
the insights of modern critical exegesis.11 In the ensuing decades, the history of
the Bibles receptionthe history of how this or that biblical character or passage
is treated in later Jewish and Christian exegesisemerged as an important
subgenre of biblical studies, best exemplified by the work of Kugel himself. The
popularity of midrash as a field of academic study in the 1980s and 1990s may be
part of this trend as well, though it also had its own dynamics. Few of these
studies argued against the literary approach in the explicit way that Kugel did,
but they were rooted in a different understanding of literary study that assigned
agency not to the text or its author but to readers who construct the text in the act
of reading it. Kugels rejection of the literary approach anticipated this trend, and
indeed his own subsequent publications would do much to refocus biblical studies
from aesthetics to reception history.
Subsequent critiques exhibit the deeper awareness of assumptions that
Kugel called for, though not perhaps in a way he would have endorsed. Mieke Bal
accepts Alters description of the Bibles literary artistry as interesting and useful,
but faults him for failing to engage in ideological criticism, for not probing the
way gender shapes the Bibles poetics.12 Focusing on Alters analysis of the Song
of Deborah in Judges 5, a song sung by a female voice, Bal argues that Alter
misses how the songs narrative of events is shaped by a different logic than the
corresponding prose account in Judges 4, a female logic...devoid of the male
concern with honor and shame. From Bals perspective, it seems, what is proble
lematic about Alters analysis is not that it anachronistically projects foreign
literary categories onto the text but that it seems oblivious to how the form of
biblical literature is inflected by gender and power.
For Burke Long, in an essay published in 1991, the problem was not just the
possibility of anachronism or unfulfilled potential; Alters translucent prose
conceals a flawed epistemological premise, the belief in the possibility of the kind
of detached objectivity associated with empirical science. For Long, the quest for
 Before and After The Art of Biblical Narrative y 199

this kind of objective knowledge was not only quixotic; it was tacitly elitist,
discounting perspectives that called its premises (and the social order in which it
was rooted) into question:

Alters longing is really for the unitary elegance of science, for that state
of knowledge that overcomes difference. In championing his particular
practice, he appears willing to displace other acts of criticism that refute
these premises of idealism. This willingness may partly explain why he
dismisses, rather than engages with, rival theories of reading and critical
practice, such as some types of deconstruction and feminism, which
resist the naturalness of such an idealized order. The truth is that (The
Literary Guide to the Bible) . . . carries cargo produced in the messiness of
the social order, and can thus enjoy no transcendent authority, even if
only by rhetorical suggestion, to prescribe a field of inquiry.13

From this perspective, there is no point to assessing what Alter says about biblical
narrative, or to asking whether his approach is anachronistic or myopic or insuffice
ciently engaged in the texts ideological orientation, because there is no reality out
there, no objective authorial intention or artistic design to which his claims could
correspond or fail to correspond; there is only the truth that scholars cannot
transcend their own vantage point and personal entanglement in a particular
social order. And so instead of critiquing Alters analysis, the truth-value or falsehe
hood of his claims, Long focuses instead on his rhetoricand on Alters books
coveras an attempt to marginalize interpretive alternatives.
These were not the sort of criticisms that could be addressed by simply fine-
tuning ones methods. None of the critics cited above denied Alters skills as a
writer and a reader, or the pleasures of reading the Bible in his way; their critice
cisms were more radical, asserting that his approach was doomed from the start
by the false assumption that out there was a realitya text, a literary competence,
an artistic unity, a meaningthat the scholar could observe and describe in an
authoritative way. Alter claimed to be introducing something new to biblical
studies. It was not new enough, counters Long, who describes what a truly novel
mode of biblical interpretation would look like from his point of view, a resistive
200 y Steven Weitzman

criticism that assumes the necessity of de-mystifying continually all acts of critice
cism.14 It would not take long for the guild to catch up with Longs vision. Much
literary work was done in the 1990sfor example, the essays collected by Cheryl
Exum and David J. A. Clines in a volume titled The New Literary Criticism and
the Hebrew Bible published in 1993but it was often closer to the resistive critice
cism he championed than to the kind of analysis that Alter practices.15
All this is to say that the turning point of which Alter and Kermode speak
seems to have been happening at precisely the moment when many biblical
scholarsindeed many literary scholars in generalwere losing the motivation
and epistemological certitude to read texts in the way the Literary Guide to the
Bible was suggesting they could and should be read. Alters approach stressed the
coherence and (at least editorial) unity of the biblical text at a time when an
increasing number of biblical scholars were newly sensitive to its incoherence and
internal tensions. It ascribed to the biblical author or editor a mastery, a control
over the meaning of the biblical text, at a time when many scholars were shifting
focus to readers and how they impose meaning on the text. Alters chief goal as
an interpreter was to account for something in the world, the biblical texts as they
actually exist, at a time when many scholars were more intent on emphasizing the
elusiveness of biblical literature, or the impossibility of objectivity, arguing as Bal
and Long do that interpretations chief task was not to retrieve or illumine the
Bible but to unmask and critique what biblical scholarship is itself doing in
purporting to interpret it. Viewed in the context of certain academic trendsthe
interest in historical narrative as a fictive construction, the entrance of Jews into
the mainstream of biblical scholarship, and so onAlters work was completely of
its age. From other perspectives, howeverperspectives that became increasingly
dominant in academic culture as it took shape in the 1980s and 1990sit was out
of sync with where biblical and humanistic scholarship was moving.
For many of those not willing to completely abandon the kind of project that
Alter exemplified, the only viable response to these theoretical challenges was a
kind of eclecticism that avoided wrestling with how each approach challenged its
competitors by validating them all.16 For his own part, Alter stuck to his interprete
tive guns, continuing to promote appreciation of the Bibles literary artistry. He
certainly was not oblivious to the counter-trends that we have been describing
 Before and After The Art of Biblical Narrative y 201

here, but he insisted that they were simply engaged in a different kind of project
than the one he was seeking to cultivate. His operating assumption, as he makes
clear in The Pleasures of Reading, is that imaginative works can be successfully and
correctly interpreted by the discerning reader, that there are transmissible skills of
reading that can help one to do so, and that it is worth undertaking this kind of
reading because the specific things that literary texts do can generate experiences,
insights, and pleasures attainable in no other way.17 Yes, literary texts can be read
in many different ways, but not because their meaning and artistry are irretrievae
ably elusive but because they are complex and multifaceted, operating on many
levels, with many working parts that can be linked together in numerous ways.
Yes, readers have agendas that can skew their understanding of a text (though,
Alter notes, their particular vantage point can also give readers better access to a
texts artistry than their predecessors), but there are some misreadings a text will
simply not support. Precisely observant reading, informed by a broad and deep
understanding of how great literature works, can truly illumine the Bibles imagine
native power, he maintains, a power that stems from the text itself and its artistic
design. In more recent years, Alter has sought to foster an appreciation of this
design among a broader general audience by means of translations that aim to
make the Bibles artistic qualities more accessible.18
Between The Art of Biblical Narrative and the Pleasures of Reading, within the
space of just a few years, the literary approach to the Bible as practiced by Alter
developed a new role as an alternative not just to source criticism and form critice
cism but also to certain strains of postmodern interpretation.19 Reading the Bible
in this way may still by this point have resonated as an innovation for many
biblical scholars, but within the field of literary study, it appeared to be a conserve
vative move, or at least a preservative one, an effort to sustain a certain way of
reading literature. I do not think it is a coincidence that in this same period more
and more scholars began to actively resist theory and its effects on literary interpe
pretation.20 Alters continued work on the Bible can be seen as part of that resiste
tance to theory, acquiring a whole new timeliness in this light.
Those working in the wake of Alters work are heir to all these trends, which
seem to coexist now in some kind of unnegotiated cease-fire, and it is not clear in
what direction literary interpretation is moving. There is a general sense that we are
202 y Steven Weitzman

living in a post-theory age, but it is unclear whether that means that theory has
prevailed and that the task is now to wrestle with its legacy, or whether theory has
failed in some way and we are now all free to ignore its efforts to unsettle interprete
tation.21 It is hard to know how vital literary interpretation itself is these days. Some
scholars speak as if it is now irrelevant even in English departments, but others
argue that it has actually triumphed, reshaping such fields as anthropology and
history on its model.22 Up to a point, somewhere in the early 1990s, it is relatively
easy to identify what the major approaches and trends were in literary studies. I find
it much more difficult, however, to characterize todays literary criticism. Here and
there in recent scholarship, one encounters the yearning to make the literary
central to literary studies again, but it is hard to know whether that is a harbinger of
a new trend in the making or nostalgia for an irretrievably bygone age.23
The confusions of the present situation create new complications for those who
would engage the Bible as a work of literature, but they also leave open the possibe
bility of continuing the project that Alter articulated so well, and this brings us to
the present volume of Prooftexts, conceived as an attempt not to defend a literary
approach to the Bible, nor to eulogize it, but simply to take its pulse in an academic
culture that has changed significantly in the last three decades. We seek as well to
pay tribute to Robert Alter for his many and enduring contributions to this subject,
making his studies of biblical narrative and poetry the touchstone for all the essays
in this volume and inviting him to respond, but our intention is not so much to
reflect on that earlier work itself but to see where scholarship has gone since the
mid-1990s and to reengage Prooftexts readers in the project Alter exemplifies. Do
scholars today think about the literariness of the Bible in a different way than they
did in 1981, or 1991, for that matter? To what extent have they revised their interpe
pretive strategies in light of intellectual trends emerging since then?
One difference between now and then is a greater self-consciousness about
the literary approach to the Bible, a recognition that this way of reading it is born
of a particular time and place, that it has a history. Three essays in this volume,
those contributed by Jonathan Sheehan, Ilana Pardes and Mara Benjamin, reflect
this heightened historical self-consciousness, reading Alters work against earlier
efforts to engage the Bibles literariness. At one level, these essays testify to the
impact of reception history on biblical studies, shifting the focus from the analye
 Before and After The Art of Biblical Narrative y 203

ysis of the Bible itself to its resonance for readers, but they move in a different
direction than Kugel. He used the history of biblical interpretation to invalidate
the literary approach, emphasizing the poor fit between its perception of the Bible
and the Bible itself. For the essays here, the issue is not whether this approach has
validity as a description of the Bible but what has made it so engaging and
impactful in particular periods of cultural history.
Read in tandem with one another, these three essays help to fill in the historie
ical backstory to Alters work, tracking the literary engagement in the Bible from
the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Since this history begins outside
Jewish culture, that is where the first two essays settle, focusing on figures who
might seem out of place in a journal of Jewish literary historythe German
literary scholar Johann Gottfried Herder and the American novelist Herman
Melvillebut who are nonetheless helpful for understanding how this approach
sustained its resonance for more than two centuries. Sheehan, noting the way in
which Alters understanding of Job reflects a view of the book that first took shape
in the eighteenth century, argues that the effort to understand Jobs poetry did
cultural work beyond illuminating the Bibles artistry, helping to revitalize the
Bible at a time when its relevance had been undercut by the emergence of secular
biblical scholarship. The view of Job this approach engendered continued to exert
an important influence in the nineteenth century, as Pardes demonstrates by
showing its impact on Moby Dick, but she reveals as well how Melville gave it a
distinctively American twist.
Rather than dismissing literary engagement in the Bible as anachronistic,
both of these essays stress how timely this interpretive mode is when understood
contextually. During the Enlightenment, of course, European culture grappled
with the idea that the Bible may not be so timely after all, discovering that its
authors lived in an entirely different environment distinguished by alien customs
and codes, and that the Hebrew Bible itself was therefore potentially irrelevant to
contemporary life. Herder enlisted the analysis of biblical poetry (and its translate
tion into modern European languages) to restore its relevance, finding in the
poetry of Job a mode of religious experience well adapted to the epistemological
limits now seen to hem in ones knowledge of the divine; this was confirmation of
his effort to connect literary expression with national identity, and a precedent for
204 y Steven Weitzman

how to speak freely within the constraints of an absolutist political system. As

Sheehan puts it, Herders Job was the perfect figure for the age of Frederick II.
This Job was also the perfect figure for the age of romanticism and American
mercantilism, Pardes argues, figuring in the production of one of the greatest
novels from this era.
The approach that Herder and others pioneered intersects with Jewish
cultural history in the early twentieth century when Martin Buber and Franz
Rosenzweig used the literary approach to the Bible to revitalize its text for a
modern German-Jewish context. Their influence on Alters work is well known
Alter himself makes it clear when he cites their notion of Leitwortstil (the repetite
tion of key words or word-roots to imply meaning beyond that which is expressly
stated in the text) as an example of how the Bible artfully deploys repetitionbut
scholars have not yet examined the connection as carefully as they might. 24 Mara
Benjamin revisits the similarity between Alters approach and that of Buber and
Rosenzweig not simply to flesh out the extent of the latters influence but also to
underscore the theological and identity issues at stake in the literary approach, its
role in rehabilitating the Bibles significance for readers unable to ground that
significance in supernatural or traditional authority, and as an intellectual alterne
native for Jewish scholars troubled by the perceived anti-Jewish bias of biblical
source criticism.
If these three essays help to fill in the before of The Art of Biblical Narrative
(earlier efforts to engage the Bibles artfulness), the second three essays give some
sense of the after of The Art of Biblical Narrative, the extent to which the
approach it represents has continued as a vital and productive one. To what extent
have literary scholars of the Bible modified their interpretive assumptions, stratege
gies, and ambitions? Menakhem Perrys contribution is particularly intriguing in
this regard because of the role he himself played as an important influence on
Alters approach. In the essay here, one can see Perry seeking to engage and
counter certain feminist readings of the Bible (including that of Ilana Pardes), but
the impact of reception theory is even more fundamental. Perry disavows any
effort to describe the true nature of the biblical text, having concluded that all
interpretive strategies, reader-hypotheses as he calls them, create the text they
purportedly describe. As one reads his analysis, one is sorely tempted to believe
 Before and After The Art of Biblical Narrative y 205

that one is gaining true insight into how biblical narrative actually coordinates the
various voices and perspectives registered within it, but to draw this conclusion
would be to contravene what Perry says about his approach, that his goal is to
develop a maximalist response to the text, not to describe the text itself. From
this perspective, the debate between Alter and Kugel becomes irrelevant since the
art of biblical narrative is not to be found (or found missing) in the text itself
but is generated through the way one chooses to read it.
Robert Kawashimas contribution reflects another response to the reception-
centered approach championed by Kugel, one that, in contrast to Perry, seeks to
validate the scholars ability to describe and analyze the true nature of the biblical
text. More than any other scholar included in this volume, Kawashima has worked
to push forward the project initiated by Alter, his teacher and dissertation adviser,
not just continuing his way of reading the Bible, but seeking to develop a more
precisely reasoned rationale for it. Important to his work, as to that of Alter, is the
comparison of biblical narrative to the modern novel, an analogy that for
Kawashima is more productive than the Bibles similarities with literary composite
tions closer in time and geography to the world in which biblical literature was
composed (regarding the latter, the contrasts with biblical narrative often seem
more salient for Kawashima than the similarities). In his contribution here,
Kawashima seeks to defend that approach against the charge of anachronism by
arguing against such scholars as Kugel that just as there are certain linguistic
universals shared by languages that are genetically and historically unrelated, so too
there are certain literary universals that cut across the differences between literary
cultures, expressive and representational possibilities inherent in the very nature of
written communication. Comparison with the modern novel, a closely studied
exemplar of written prose narrative, is potentially useful for understanding biblical
narrative to the extent that it helps to identify what biblical authors make of these
possibilities. Kawashimas point is not to oppose the study of the Bibles reception
history; what he resists is using that reception-history to relativize all interpretation,
to deny scholars the capacity to move beyond the confines of their historically situae
ated subjectivity to discern something real about the text.
Chaya Halberstam seeks to continue Alters project in a different way, not by
defending its assumptions but by extending it to an aspect of biblical literature not
206 y Steven Weitzman

addressed in The Art of Biblical Narrative, the incorporation of legal material within
a narrative setting (a topic engaged by other recent biblical scholars, as her annotate
tions make clear). In contrast to Kawashima, her analysis is rooted in discontent
with the categories we use to describe the Bible, categories that obscure the interpe
play between seemingly discrete modalities like narrative and law, but she also finds
in recent literary theory, and in particular the linguistic turn in legal studies, a
way to correct for the blind spots of the literary approach to the Bible. The fact that
Alter has relatively little to say about biblical law might be cited as further evidence
of anachronism: his approach can encompass those parts of the Bible that seem
literary from a modern perspectivenarrative prose and poetrybut in so doing, it
obscures aspects of the text that do not conform to our literary sensibilitiesi.e.
legal textsor else creates artificial boundaries between them and the narratives in
which they are incorporated. But that is not where Halberstam takes her analysis;
instead, she finds in Alters work a way to make sense of biblical law as well, and a
way to reintegrate it into the study of biblical narrative.
Both Kawashima and Halberstam model their work on the study of more
recent genresthe novel or modern lawand to some, such an interpretive move
might appear to only intensify the anachronism of reading the Bible as a work of
literature. Whether that is the case or not, the use of such models is timely in
another sense, abetting the recontextualization of academic biblical studies from
Near Eastern language departments to Comparative Literature, Religious
Studies, and Jewish Studies settings that encourage different kinds of comparise
sons and contextualizations. For better or for worse (or, in my own judgment, for
better and for worse), the transition is still underway, with students of these
programs now entering the profession and shaping its future, and scholars like
Kawashima and Halberstam are at the very least being opportune in using the
literary approach to adapt biblical studies to this new environment, as they are
developing ways to make biblical studies relevant to the study of literary, religion,
and Jewish Studies.
The contextualizing approach I have adopted in this introductionmy effort
to link Alters work to trends specific to the 1970s and 1980smight seem to
suggest that I myself see this approach as a thing of the past. The history of biblical
interpretation shows that the perception of the Bible as a literary artifact seems
 Before and After The Art of Biblical Narrative y 207

more viable at certain moments of cultural history than at others, and the moment
that made Alters work so resonant may now be over. But in truth, my sense of
things is more open-ended than that. The essays presented herenot to mention
the continuing success of Alters own workare evidence that the effort to underse
stand the Bible as a work of literature retains some of the energizing capacity that it
had in previous decades, is still able to stimulate and guide scholarly imaginations
in their encounter with the biblical text. They rethink key assumptions, have
adjusted their reading strategies, and/or take the literary approach in new directe
tions, but they also show that bright scholars working today continue to believe that
the project Alter was engaged in still deserves, and repays, intellectual investment.
Recognizing that there are scholars still doing this kind of work does not
guarantee that it is wired into the times in a broader sense, howeverthat there is
still an audience engaged by the kind of questions it asks. Whether such studies
can still persuade or even secure the notice of readers is the very question we
mean to broach in this volume, and it is why we would like to invite readers of
Prooftexts to participate in a virtual discussion of the topic. From its first volume,
Prooftexts has brought together two opposing views on the subject, publishing
essays that seek to illumine the Bibles artistry while also serving as a venue for
those critical of the approach and the assumptions it makes about the Bible. In
what ways does the literary approach to the Bible remain an engaging and defense
sible project? Can it again play the role it did in the hands of an Alter, not just
feeding off what scholars in other disciplines are doing with texts or mimicking
their interpretive moves, but helping to shape the future of literary study?
More than just biblical scholars have a stake in the outcome of this discusse
sion, for it bears on the role of the Bible in the larger project that Prooftexts represe
sents. Is the Bible merely a prooftext in the context of Jewish literary history,
relevant for Jewish literary history only to the extent that it is evoked and reimagie
ined by later Jewish texts, or can it be integrated into the study of Jewish literary
history as an aesthetic artifact in its own right? The post-theory moment in
which we are now situated (not to mention the recent changes in the leadership of
Prooftexts) provides an opportunity to reconsider such fundamental questions in a
chastened but open-ended way, with technology making it possible to broaden the
discussion to a wider circle of participants.
208 y Steven Weitzman

In that spirit, I would like to invite your response to the questions and issues
raised in this volume, and will work with the editors of Prooftexts to publish espece
cially thoughtful and well-argued submissions (send responses to prooftext@jtsa.
edu). In the meantime, as someone whose own scholarly trajectory was shaped in
no small part by Alters influence, I want to close by thanking him for helping to
reinvigorate biblical studies in the last three decades by so artfully demonstrating
the Bibles relevance for anyone interested in literature and how it works.
Department of Religion
Indiana University

N O TE S

1 Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, The Literary Guide to the Bible (Cambridge: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 34.

2 For eighteenth-century precedents, see Stephen Prickett, Words and the Word:
Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986); Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship,
Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 2005), 14881, and his submission
in this volume.

3 See The Complete Prose of Matthew Arnold, vol. 7, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press), 148, cited in David Norton, From 1700 to the
Present Day, vol. 2 of A History of the Bible as Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 273.

4 Norton, A History of the Bible as Literature, 276300.

5 For a survey of some of this work, see Martin Buss, Biblical Form Criticism in its
Context (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 16774.

6 An influence acknowledged most explicitly by Meir Weiss, The Bible from Within:
The Method of Total Interpretation (Jerusalem; Magnes Press, 1984), 127.
7 M. Greenberg, Can Modern Biblical Scholarship Have a Jewish Character?
Immanuel 15 (1982/83): 712, reprinted in M. Greenberg, Studies in the Bible and
Jewish Thought (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), 38. The trend
to which Greenberg is referring is corroborated by David Sperlings history of
Jewish biblical scholarship in North America (Students of the Covenant: A History
of Jewish Biblical Scholarship in North America [with contributions by Baruch
 Before and After The Art of Biblical Narrative y 209

Levine and B. Barry Levy; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992). As Sperling notes, in
the 1960s the ranks of Jewish biblical scholars began to swell considerably, partly
because of more inclusive admission policies in preceding years, partly because of
successful precedents set by such scholars as Nahum Sarna and Jacob Milgrom,
and partly because of the increased involvement of female scholars. Sperling also
observes (p. 117) that this new generation of scholars tended to be more self-
consciously Jewish in their scholarship, defining the distinctive features of Jewish
biblical scholarship in opposition to an earlier scholarship influenced by Proteste
tant assumptions. For more on how these scholars have had an influence on
biblical scholarship, see Alan Cooper, Biblical Studies and Jewish Studies, The
Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, eds. Martin Goodman, Jeremy Cohen, and
David Sorkin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1435.

8 Cf. Moshe Greenberg, To Whom and for What Should the Bible Commentator Be
Responsible? Proceedings of the Tenth World Congress of Jewish Studies: Division A:
The Bible and its World (1990): 2938, reprinted in Studies in The Bible and Jewish
Thought, 235243, esp. 23637.

9 James Kugel, On the Bible and Literary Criticism, Prooftexts 1, no. 3 (1981):
21736.

10 For an overview of reader-centered approaches, see Raman Selden, ed., From

Formalism to Poststructuralism, vol. 8 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 255403.

11 Brevard Childs, The Book of Exodus: a Critical, Theological Commentary (Philadelphia:

Westminster, 1974).

12 Mieke Bal, The Bible as Literature: a Critical Escape, Diacritics 16 (1986): 7179.

13 Burke O. Long, The New Biblical Poetics of Alter and Sternberg, Journal for the
Study of the Old Testament 51 (1991): 7184.

14 Ibid., 8384.

15 J. Cheryl Exum and David J. A. Clines, eds., The New Literary Criticism and the
Hebrew Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993).

16 For an example of such eclecticism, see the various kinds of biblical interpretation
brought together in Regina Schwartz, ed., The Book and the Text: The Bible and
Literary Theory (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990).

17 Robert Alter, The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1989).
210 y Steven Weitzman

18 Cf. Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses (New York/London: W.W. Norton and
Company, 2004): The present translation, whatever its imperfections, seeks to do
fuller justice to all these aspects of biblical style in the hope of making the rich literary
experience of the Hebrew more accessible to readers in English (p. xlv; italics mine).

19 In The Art of Biblical Narrative, published in 1981, Alter does not yet address
postmodern views of literary texts as he does in work published later that decade,
placing his approach in opposition to structuralism but not to poststructuralism.

20 See, for example, Steve Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, Against Theory, Critical
Inquiry 8 (1982): 72342. The backlash against theory has grown especially acute in
the last decade, as articulated, for example, in a public symposium organized by
Critical Inquiry in 2003, in which it was asserted that the great era of theory is now
behind us. See W. J. T. Mitchell, Medium Theory: Preface to the 2003 Critical
Inquiry Symposium, Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 32435.

21 One sign that the announced death of theory (as in the last note) may have been
premature is how the death of theory has become the object of theoretical
reflection in its own right. See, for example, Barbara Johnson, The Wake of
Deconstruction (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994); Martin McQuillan, Graeme
Macdonald, Robin Purves, and Stephen Thomson, Post-Theory: New Directions in
Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), or Judith Butler, John
Guillory, and Kendall Thomas, eds., Whats Left of Theory? New Work on the
Politics of Literary Theory (New York: Routledge, 2000).

22 For the former view, see, for example, Catherine Belsey, English Studies in the Post-
modern Condition: Towards a Place for the Signifier, Post-Theory, 12338; for the
latter view, see David Simpson, The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature:
A Report on Half-Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

23 See, for example, Richard Rorty, The Inspirational Value of Great Works of
Literature, Raritan 16 (1996): 817; Marjorie Garber, A Manifesto for Literary
Studies (University of Washington: Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the
Humanities, 2003), 314; Jonathan Culler, The Literary in Theory, in Butler et
al., Whats Left of Theory, 27392.

24 See Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Book, 1981), 9295.