So I’m done with the Babylonians and Egyptians and on to the longest and most complete Ancient Near Eastern canon we have: obviously, the Hebrew Bible. I’ve been trying for years to make literary sense of what Christians call, sometimes disparagingly, the Old Testament, and this time around I find there’s a lot of good sense in Meir Sternberg’s The Poetics of Biblical Narrative.
Ideology, aesthetics and historiography are, for him, the Hebrew Bible’s “three regulating principles”: the writers’ art springs from their attempts to satisfy all three of these imperatives at once. “[T]heir interests and formulations so coalesce that they can hardly be told apart in the finished message.” He elaborates: “To start with ideology, theologians … have rightly singled out features like monotheism, the suppression of myth, the rise of ethics and personal responsibility. But what has generally escaped notice is the shift of ground from existence to epistemology. … Within the Israelite reality model, briefly, God stands opposed to humankind not so much in terms of mortality … as in terms of knowledge. … God is omniscient, man limited, and the boundary impassible. But how to expound and inculcate this new doctrine? Fortunately, both the pragmatic constraints on exposition and the aesthetic preference for indirection ruled out the discursive treatment to which a modern (or a Greek) thinker would almost automatically resort. The solution devised was no less epoch-making … than the philosophy itself: to build the cognitive antithesis between God and humanity into the structure of the narrative.”
And thus we end up with the famous laconic style of the OT writers. Theology and, possibly, a spotty historical record create aesthetic constraints which they, like great artists anywhere, turn into opportunity. They invent a narrative style in which “history unrolls as a continuum of discontinuities, a sequence of non sequiturs, which challenge us to repair omissions by our native wit.” The reader, seeking to make sense of it all, vividly feels that “impassable boundary” between God’s knowledge and our ignorance: “The only knowledge perfectly acquired is the knowledge of our limitation … to gain a sense of the discourse is to gain a sense of being human.”
The same might be said of the reader of Sternberg’s book, which has blown my mind on several occasions, and put me to sleep on several others.
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