Authors: David M. Gunn, Danna Nolan Fewell, Danna Nolan Fewell, Danna Nolan Fewell
ISBN-13: 9780192132451, ISBN-10: 0192132458
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Date Published: July 1993
Edition: 1st Edition
Texas Christian University
Southern Methodist University
After almost two centuries of historical criticism, biblical scholarship has recently taken major shifts in direction, most notably toward literary study of the Bible. Much germinal criticism has taken as its primary focus narrative texts of the Hebrew Bible (the "Old Testament"). This study provides a lucid guide to the interpretive possibilities of this movement. Attempting to be both theoretical and practical, it combines discussion of methods and the business of reading in general with numerous illustrations through readings of particular texts. Gunn and Fewell discuss how literary criticism is related to other dominant ways of reading the text over the last two thousand years. In addition, they address characters, including the narrator and God; plot, modifying recent theory to accommodate the peculiar complexity of biblical narratives; and the play of language through repetition, ambiguity, multivalence, metaphor, and intertextuality. Finally, the authors discuss readers and responsibility, exploring the ideological dimension of narrative interpretation. An extensive bibliography completes the book, arranged by subject and biblical text.
1 | Strategies for Reading | 1 |
Narrative | 1 | |
Biblical narrative | 3 | |
Historical criticism, literary criticism, and the meanings of the text | 7 | |
Varieties of interpretation: Genesis 4 through 2000 years | 12 | |
Similarity and difference | 27 | |
2 | Tamar and Judah: Genesis 38 | 34 |
3 | Characters and Narrators | 46 |
Readers and people | 46 | |
The narrator | 52 | |
The characters | 63 | |
Reconstructing characters | 75 | |
Reconstructing YHWH | 81 | |
4 | Abraham and Sarah: Genesis 11-22 | 90 |
5 | Designs on the Plot | 101 |
Reading for the plot: desire for order | 101 | |
Plots and points of view: Judges 10-12 | 112 | |
Fracturing the plot: the codas to Judges and Samuel | 120 | |
6 | Jonah and God: The Book of Jonah | 129 |
7 | The Lure of Language | 147 |
Repetition and variation | 148 | |
Multivalence, ambiguity, and metaphor | 155 | |
Reading for the metaphor: Judges 1 | 158 | |
Allusion and intertextuality | 163 | |
Reading between words and stories: the house of David | 165 | |
8 | Nebuchadnezzar and the Three Jews: Daniel 3 | 174 |
9 | Readers and Responsibility | 189 |
Literature and ideology | 189 | |
The Bible and ideology | 192 | |
Genesis 2-3: women, men, and God | 194 | |
Conclusion | 204 | |
Bibliography | 206 | |
Index of Passages Cited | 253 | |
Index of Biblical Names | 257 | |
General Index | 260 |