Robert Alter is a prominent linguist and Hebrew scholar. He has written many books on the Hebrew Bible as literature and completed his own translation several years ago. For Christians, his contribution to the study of OT (and indirectly of NT) is to raise the awareness of Scripture as an art of literature: how the authors organized particular words into narrative, dialogue, and poetry, and how the readers should understand the authorial design behind them. Here we look at his book “The Art of Biblical Narrative” (revised and updated edition, BASIC book, 2011, paperback).
Alter’s approach to the Hebrew Bible follows High Criticism and typical theological liberalism. He does not accept the Scripture as divinely inspired or of any divine origin. He does not believe most of the documents were ancient enough to be contemporary witnesses of major events described (therefore, they were later artistic constructions, see below). For example, for the Pentateuch, he adopted the traditional four-source theory, which was important to his analysis of Geensis 1-2 (p. 175-183). His liberal view on Scripture means Christians who are theologically orthodox have to search through this framework to identity elements consistent with biblical truth. He has insightful observations on literary instruments, but he often explains them with liberal hypothesis. So we need to make use of his observations and interpret them under a different structure. Besides that, our interest in Scripture as literary art is only the means to our understanding Scripture as God’s Word. We do not look at art for the sake of art only. From this perspective, some of his analysis seem to be too trivial to be discussed (it is fine to notice those patterns, but it seems irrelevant to our ultimate objective).
The book has nine chapters. Chapter 1 is an introduction of his overall concept of approaching Bible as literature. The example of Genesis 38 is used to highlight the importance of looking carefully into the text and find out patterns designed by the author(s). Careful observation of the text is a fundamental principle recognized by faithful Christians throughout the ages (e.g., p. 172-176 in the article, A Study Method for Expository Preaching in Preaching, edited by John MacArthur). Sometimes one may tend to focus too heavily on the overarching theological and biblical themes while glossing over textual details (especially in the original language) which map out the authorial intent (of course, one may head to the other extreme).
In Chapter 2, Sacred History and the Beginning of Prose Fiction, Alter raises the idea of Scripture as prose fiction, “the [biblical] writers exercised a good deal of artistic freedom in articulating the traditions at their disposal” (p.26), “we can speak of the Bible as historicized prose fiction” (p.27, emphasis original). Such statements inevitably raise eyebrows of orthodox Christians (Jews too). Concerning the nature of Scripture, Alter rejects its divine origin but also, to a large extent, its historical validity. “Prose fiction” is a literary tool, “affording writers a remarkable range and flexibility in the means of presentation, could be utilized to liberate fictional personages from fixed choreography of timeless events” (p.28). The following discussion on Genesis 2:18-25 unfolds the deconstruction of the prose fiction based upon this assumption. Although acknowledging the ignorance of the original versions, Alter concludes, “the writer could manipulate his inherited materials with sufficient freedom and sufficient firmness of authorial purpose to define motives, relations, and unfolding themes” (p.36). He then cited stories of David confronting Saul at the cave (1 Sam. 24), Eglon assassinating King of Moab (Judges 3), and Esau selling birthright (Gen. 25), to show “these stories are not, strictly speaking, historiography, but rather the imaginative reenactment of history by a gifted writer who organizes his materials along certain thematic biases and according to his own remarkable intuition of the psychology of the characters” (p.40). This chapter is mostly useless because of that.
Chapter 3 talks about Biblical Type-Scenes and the Uses of Convention, discussing the repetition of the same story/pattern (convention) in the biblical narrative. The examples given are the betrothal scenes in Genesis 24:10-61, 29:1-20, Exodus 2:16-21, Ruth 2:8-9, and ! Sam. 9:11-12. The type-scene is a man meets a woman at a well (with minor changes or a reverse of roles). The point is, “the type-scene is … a means of attaching that moment to a larger pattern of historical and theological meaning” (p.72). The type-scene connects the current story to its predecessors and shows its significance in history (Jacob is like Issac, Moses is like Jocob, etc.). Alter raises an often-neglected phenomenon: the effect of conventions on the readers/listeners. He cited E. H. Gombrich, “the great the probability of a symbol’s occurrence in any given situation, the smaller will be its information content. Where we can anticipate we need not listen”. Alter concludes, “reading any body of literature involves a specialized mode of perception in which every culture trains its members from childhood” (p.74). No reader reads a text in a vacuum. His mind is preconditioned and prepared by his culture and education. At the moment he is receiving information, he is also anticipating. He is creating a story before the story created by the author unfolds. This interaction between the reader and the author is critical in the reader’s perception of the text in the end. Of course, he attributes the use of type-scenes to the author’s imaginative construction. But his observation is valid and helpful (he also lightly rebukes the arrogance of modern critical scholars, p.77).
Chapter 4, Between Narration and Dialogue, shows how the authors weave narration and dialogue purposefully and artistically. Most of the time, the authors use dialogues to advance the story, leaving minimal space for narration (exemplified in 1 Sam. 21:2-11). Monologue is another method commonly used, as in 1 Sam. 27:1 and 2 Sam. 2:1. Alter defines this approach as “the bias stylization in the biblical commitment to dialogue”, p.86) and “Bible’s narration-through-dialogue” (p.87). “Spoken language is the substratum of everything human and divine that transpires in the Bible, and the Hebrew tendency to transpose what is preverbal or nonverbal into speech is finally a technique for getting at the essence of things, for obtruding their substratum” (p. 87). This is a brilliant analysis. He then goes through several examples to show how dialogues work out the literary purpose of the author (David waiting for the news in 2 Sam. 18, David and Ahimelech in 1 Sam. 21). In the latter example, he points out the use of “contrastive dialogue”, then discussed it as between Elijiah and Obadiah in 1 Kings 18:9-14, between Amon and Tamar in 2 Sam 13, in Job 1-2, and in 2 Sam. 17. The narration serves three general functions to the dialogues (p.96): conveying essential information, communication of data ancillary, and commentaries. The rest of the chapter expanded these points through examples.
Chapter 5 is about repetition of a word, a motif, a theme, sequence of actions, or type-scene (p.120-121). Some of them have showed up in the chapters before. This is not just about repetitions, but variations in repetitions. The readers should be mindful of what is repeated and what is varied. Alter analyzed the speeches of Bathsheba and Nathan in 1 Kings 1 and of Manoah’s wife and Manoah in Judges 3. Not all his analysis appears valid (laboriously splitting the fine points), but the principle in general can be useful. The last two examples are Numbers 22-24 and Genesis 39. The conclusion is, “beyond this constant interplay through repetition between speech and narration, biblical personages and events are caught in a finer web of reiteration in the design of thematic words and phrases constantly recurring” (p.141).
Chapter 6 is on Characterization and the Art of Reticence. How the Bible depicts the character of a man. Alter gives a scale of means in ascending order of explicitness and certainty (p. 146). The biblical authors are frugal in their giving out of information. Often what is not said is as important and what is explicitly said (art of reticence). For example, Alter points out that in 1 Sam. 18:14-30, “the means of presenting Saul are drawn from the top of our ascending scale of certainties” (p.147), while “the means used to represent David are deliberately limited to the lower and middle range of our ascending scale of certainties” (p.149). He then goes through the relationship between David and Michal. The biblical narrator “leads us through varying darkness that are lit up by intense but narrow beams, phantasmal glimmerings, sudden strobic flashes” (p.158). This provides us a unique perspective when reading the Bible and demands an epistemological humility (we should not use our imagination to fill the gaps, if we believe the Scripture is sufficient).
Chapter 7, Composite Artistry, returns to the multi-source theory to explain the composition of the books. Alter tries to analyze the supposed incoherence of the Bible, such as the two narratives of judgment in Number 16 and the two narratives of creation in Genesis 1-2. He may draw a slightly different conclusion from a conventional liberal, and accepts that “there are aspects of the composite nature of biblical narrative texts that we cannot confidently encompass in our own explanatory systems” (p.170), but the essence remains the same. The middle part on Genesis 2 is quite typical although offering more details than usual. Another example employed is the two encounters between Saul and David.
Last chapter, Narration and Knowledge, focuses on the human characters in the story and their perception of the reality as events unfolds. This chapter has mostly spent on the analysis of Genesis 42-45, the multiple interactions between Joseph and his brothers and between his brothers and Jacob. The story shows the “abiding perplexities of man’s creaturely condition” (p.220), “a human being with a divided consciousness” (p.219). The complexity of human character and interaction is often overlooked as we seek to see everything in black and white. This is not to say there is no black and white, there are and there are many. But that does not negate the fact that the world and man are too complicated to be treated as a machine or a label.
This relates to some observations showing up almost at the end of every chapter. Again, his observation is correct to some extent though his analysis is not. He touches on an overarching theme in the Hebrew Bible (also applies to the NT). “This enactment, however, is continuously complicated by a perception of two, approximately parallel, dialectical tensions. One is a tension between divine plan and the disorderly character of actual historical events, …; the other is a tension between God’s will, his providential guidance, and human freedom, the refractory nature of man.” (p.37) “The depth with which human nature is imagined in the Bible is a function of its being conceived as caught in the powerful interplay of this double dialectic between design and order, providence and freedom.” (p.38) “The human figures in the large biblical landscape act as free agents out of the impulses of a memorable and often fiercely assertive individuality, but the actions they perform all ultimately fall into the symmetries and recurrences of God’s comprehensive design. … Finally, it is the inescapable tension between human freedom and divine historical plan that is brought forth so luminously through the pervasive repetitions of the Bible’s narrative art.” (p.141) “It left little margin for neat and confident views about God, the created world, history, and man as political animal 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. The biblical outlook if informed, I think, by a sense of stubborn contradiction, of a profound and ineradicable untidiness in the nature of things, and it is toward the expression of such a sense of moral and historical reality that the composite artistry of the Bible is directed.” (p.192)
These are not theologically precise expressions, but Alter has pointed out something central in the biblical revelation, even from a literary perspective, which is the existence of tension between the immediate reality we perceive and the ultimate reality God ordains. This is not limited to the Calvinist-Arminian or Augustine-Pelagius debate. This is something fundamental underlying all biblical teaching, in both narratives and in theological treatises. The fact is that biblical authors, in both OT and NT, have no hesitance in presenting this tension, although they are fully conscious of it as Alter shows. This may help us to structure our own understanding of the tension.
The conclusion is a summary of the content discussed before. He puts them under four general rubrics: words, actions, dialogues, and narration (p.223). “The reading of any literary text requires us to perform all sorts of operations of linkage, both small and large, and at the same time to make constant discriminations among related but different words, statements, actions, characters, relations, and situations.” And this is rooted in the authorial design, so that “the human figures that move through this landscape thus seem livelier, more complicated and various…” (p.234) A good advice that students of the Bible should listen.
