Robert Alter, on reading the Hebrew Bible, again:

To understand a narrative art so bare of embellishment and explicit commentary, one must be constantly aware of two features: the repeated use of narrative analogy, through which one part of the text provides oblique commentary on another; and the richly expressive function of syntax, which often bears the kind of weight of meaning that, say, imagery does in a novel by Virginia Woolf or analysis in a novel by George Eliot.

Attention to such features leads not to a more “imaginative” reading of the biblical narrative but to a more precise one; and since all these features are linked to discernable details in the Hebrew text, the literary approach is actually a good deal less conjectural than the histoical scholarship that askes of a verse whether it contains possible Akkadian loanwords, whether it reflects Sumerian kinship practices, whether it may have been corrupted by scribal error.

In any case, the fact that the text is ancient and that its characteristic narrative procedures may differ in many respects from those of modern texts should not lead us to any condescending preconception that the text is therefore bound to be crude or simple. Tzvetan Todorov has shrewdly argued that the whole notion of “primitive narrative” is a kind of mental mirage engendered by modern parochialism, for the more closely you look at a particular ancient narrative, the more you are compelled to recognize the complexity and subtlety with which it is formally organized and with which it renders its subjects, and the more you see how it is conscious of its necessary status as artful discourse. It is only by imposing a naive and unexamined aesthetic of their own, Todorov proposes, that modern scholars are able to declare so confidently that certain parts of the ancient text could not belong with others: the supposedly primitive narrative is subjected by scholars to tacit laws like the law of stylistic unity, of noncontradiction, of nondigression, of nonrepetition, and by these dim but purportedly universal lights is found to be composite, deficient, or incoherent. (If just these four laws were applied respectively to Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, Tristram Shandy, and Jealousy, each of those novels would have to be relegated to the dustbin of shoddily “redacted” literary scraps.) Attention to the ancient narrative’s consciousness of its own operations, Todorov proposes, will reveal how irrelevant these complacently assumed criteria generally are.

And this from a scholar who doesn’t even believe the texts are divinely inspired. How embarrassing!

A. T. Ross’ review of Peter Leithart’s recent book, The Four: A Survey of the Gospels. From www.goodreads.com

A wonderful follow-up book to Leithart’s A House For My Name, this one focusing on the gospels. I hope he plans to do a third to complete the set, focusing on a survey of the entire the New Testament as the completion of God’s house.

That said, this book was a great study on the gospels, focusing on the complementary aspects of them, showing the continuity and richness of the theology contained in them. With deft and able skills, Leithart deflects the common assumptions about Jesus. His section on Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount was particularly interesting. His chapter on Luke’s gospel was especially good, showing how Luke and Acts are both structured identically, revealing that, for Luke, the story of Christ as head (Gospel of Luke) becomes the story of Christ the whole body, the Church (the Acts of the Apostles).

One of the best and most important sections in the book is Leithart’s discussion of the Q document, the supposed intermediate gospel relied upon by Matthew and Luke. Most scholars, on the basis of the phantom Q document, argue that Mark was written first, then Matthew and Luke, who copied from Mark and Q. The only problem is that there is no such document as Q, and as Leithart points out, the Q gospel is made up mostly of the prejudices of the scholars who imagined it. As an alternative theory, Leithart shows how the theology of the Gospels answer the questions of the last. So Matthew’s gospel raises questions that Mark answers, and Luke answers the questions of Mark, and John completes the picture. Thus, he shows that supposing a missing Q document is completely unnecessary, and actually destroys the theological continuity of the four as they stand. Bold, and refreshing. Highly recommended, especially by such a noted ecumenical scholar.

Ignorant (willfully?) of ancient literary conventions, higher critics explained the carelessness of arrangement they thought was apparent in Old Testament books with fallacies like the JEDP theory. It turns out they were very wrong. James Jordan writes:

“Chiastic literary analysis has completely destroyed liberal literary criticism. Liberalism is in tatters, bleeding and dying. Liberalism cannot survive Dorsey’s chiastic proof of the total unity of Isaiah, for instance. Dorsey finds loads of 7-fold chiasms in the Bible. I’ve found scores more, quite independently. What Dorsey does not see is that these are recaps of the chiasm of the 7 days in Genesis 1. And that’s good, because it means he did not go through the Bible forcing passages into heptamerous chiasms. He just found them there, and others can see that these track Genesis 1 as “new creation” passages.” [1]

All of the books of the New Testament display the same phenomenal craftsmanship inherent in the Old. Post-exilic Jews were people of the book, as Christians are, and this flows into culture as literacy. The gospels, the synoptic ones at least, were written very early. They aren’t a later record of oral traditions and they weren’t written by trailer trash. They are high art, written by people of means.

“It is often assumed by people, though not by all scholars by any means, that the disciples of jesus were poor and uneducated people. This is not so, and it can be shown rather quickly that it is not.

First, we find that Matthew, Peter and John were capable of composing very sophisticated literary works that are right in line with the style and form of the canonical works of what we call the “Old Testament.” This means that they were aware of the stylised hieratic scribal Hebrew used in the Hebrew Bible and capable of joining in that flow of writing. So also were Mark, Luke, Paul, James and Jude.” [2]

The Jews examined their Scriptures very closely. They turned them inside out and upside down and still do. The crowd at Biblical Horizons have done this with the New Testament and discovered the same literary structures.

Perhaps the Old Testament and New Testament departments in Bible colleges and seminaries ought to talk to each other more often, and drop the false critical paradigm that maintains the authors of Scripture, and their writings, are “encultured” and therefore must be analysed with blinkers on. [3]

Jordan despises the Old/New Testament division and rightly so. The 400 year gap between Malachi and Matthew is in reality no more significant (or just as significant, typologically) than the gap between Joseph and Moses, and the later ones.

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[1] James B. Jordan, A Reply on the Nature of the Psalter, Biblical Horizons blog, biblicalhorizons.wordpress.com, referring to David A. Dorsey, The Literary Structure of the Old Testament. Dorsey’s book is a must-have for reference.
[2] James B. Jordan, Getting Real in the Gospels, Biblical Horizons Newsletter No. 205, October 2009. Subscribe at www.biblicalhorizons.com
Jordan goes on to discuss the great evidence for the disciples, apostles, and indeed Joseph and Mary, being upper middle (working) class. 
[3] See Threshing the Text.

Higher criticism, like the ape-people story, is a fabrication patched together by rebels.

The “potent cause of modern unbelief” (Herbert) is not belief in Biblical infallibility, but a century of disbelieving it.

Dissatisfaction with the traditional view of revelation was not created by the rise of Biblical criticism. Criticism was born out of its denial. For in its modern form, criticism is for the most part grounded upon naturalistic presuppositions which reflect scepticism in the supernatural content and preparation of the Bible. Existential theology capitalises on the blur created by negative criticism around the Bible and attempts a salvage operation amidst the wreckage.

The result, however, is the rescue of nothing specifically Christian. Instead the loss of sola scriptura only leads us to a new sacerdotalism (the church is the matrix of the “tradition”), a new clericalism (the expert applies his existential gnosis to Scripture for us), and a new mystical agnosticism (a faith tailored to survive even if God is not there).

—Clark H. Pinnock, A Defense of Biblical Infallibility, 1967, p. 7. My Hebrew teacher studied Greek with Pinnock, who had a parrot trained to recite the Lord’s prayer in Greek. In recent years, Pinnock has sadly embraced open theism.

Yet more on literary analysis of the Bible as a ‘terrible marvel‘; a review of two books. As Warren Gage has commented, we are on the verge of a tremendously creative time in Biblical theology. But this to me seems also to be an element of scholarship returning home, older and wiser, from a wilderness of unbelief.

Genesis: The Story We Haven’t Heard
by Paul Borgman. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2001. 252 pages.

The Literary Structure of the Old Testament: A Commentary on Genesis-Malachi
by David A. Dorsey. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999. 330 pages.

Reviewed by Timothy Paul Erdel, Ph.D., Archivist and Assistant Professor of Religion and Philosophy, Bethel College, Mishawaka, IN.

“I have been fascinated by the primal power of Old Testament stories for as long as I can remember. From my perspective, there is no clearer window on human character, no greater storehouse of hard and holy truths. Yet some tales are deeply disturbing. Phyllis Trible calls them ‘texts of terror.’ Even the most familiar passages may seem strangely distant. So I relish each time a preacher or teacher sheds new light on these ancient Hebrew narratives.

The greatest of all great books, the Bible has been the focus of far more sustained and intensive scholarly scrutiny than any other work. Since the modern era, this critical dissection sometimes threatens to destroy everything precious to traditional readers: the religious message, the historical reliability, the underlying drama, and the unity of the writings. Nevertheless, despite two centuries of critical assaults, Bible stories continue to illumine for many of us believers both the will of God and the meta-narratives of our own lives.

Is it too much to hope that serious Old Testament monographs might acknowledge what seems so obvious to the ordinary religious reader, the spellbinding attraction of biblical stories? Could such studies simultaneously help us to see in those same stories all sorts of literary devices we might otherwise gloss over-even though once pointed out the devices seem so patently clear as to be undeniable? Could these newly manifest literary structures in turn underscore moral and religious truths we might also all too readily overlook? And could it possibly be the case, mirabile dictu, that these ever so subtle and tightly woven literary structures would in turn, once recognized, expose some favorite modern critical (i.e., skeptical) theories about the sequence of and motivations for biblical compositions as hopelessly implausible? Could it be that the sorts of generic doubts raised by C. S. Lewis (no mean literary critic himself) about standard biblical criticisms have now found their mundane confirmation in the work of two very patient and observant scholars working out of the limelight at relatively small evangelical schools?

The great good news is that the two books under review provide us with all the foregoing and much more. It is hard for me to describe how refreshing I find their approaches; but since this is to be a relatively brief review, I will restrict myself to a basic example or two from each work.

The story of Abraham offering Isaac on the altar is a powerful one on almost any reading. It has a long history of Rabbinic interpretation, and in the modern era has served as a favorite text for philosophers of religion as well, especially since Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, though Kant took up the story before him.

Critical studies in Genesis have often added to the notion that the story is both bizarre and extreme, and that the God revealed therein is both primitive and arbitrary, unworthy of enlightened religious sensibilities. What Paul Borgman (at Gordon College) does magnificently, though not without a hint or two from Martin Buber, is not only call attention to various details we might otherwise overlook, but stress the literary and moral and religious interconnectedness between this story and nearly everything else that has occurred in Genesis up to this point. Throughout his life Abraham has been tried and tested by some of the same temptations that already seduced Eve, Cain, Lamech, and the builders of the Tower of Babel. He has, repeatedly and to an astonishing degree, failed, as Borgman’s close reading of the text makes clear. But God has not given up on Abraham, and there has been at least some definite progress in each of the previous six visits God has made with Abraham. Now in this seventh visit, the chiasm (symmetry) is complete and virtually every detail of the story ties together dangling threads, not just from Abraham’s own life and experience, but from the whole of Genesis up to this point. You will simply have to read the book to find out why all this is so.

David Dorsey (Evangelical School of Theology) offers an unparalleled tour de force, the systematic laying out of the literary structure of every book in the Old Testament. Scholars have long recognized that repetition, parallelism, chiasm, sevenfold patterns, and similar devices permeate the ancient Hebrew Scriptures. Dorsey merely sets about identifying their occurrences and then seeing what the patterns in each book might tell us about it. What he often finds is, in retrospect, almost embarrassingly simple, but as elegant and powerful as a cleanly constructed mathematical proof. For example, even Old Testament scholars on the theological far right, such as R. K. Harrison and Gleason Archer, have admitted that Jeremiah apparently defies attempts to find an overarching orderly structure. Nevertheless, Dorsey sets out what he has discovered, and once presented, the book’s sevenfold structure seems quite sensible. Or again, given the all but universal tendency among modern scholars to divide Isaiah into separate writings, how would such scholars now explain the literary unity of Isaiah as a giant yet intricately crafted chiasm?

I trust I have not over stressed the polemical aspects in this review, which are more implicit than explicit in these two studies. For Borgman and Dorsey are both deeply indebted to other scholars of very different stripes. Furthermore, both Borgman and Dorsey, though committed evangelical biblicists, offer some striking reinterpretations and emphases that could offend evangelicals, such as Borgman’s stress on the depth and frequency of Abraham’s failures. But the genius of their approaches is that they are so directly tied to the text itself, not to highly speculative critical theories, therefore inviting correction from that same text. Nor does one need to agree uniformly with them to stand in awe of what they have achieved.”

PDF found here.

As an aside, Jordan’s book Primeval Saints takes the opposite position on the faithfulness of Abraham and the other patriarchs.

It seems we either read the Bible carefully but with the blinkers of remnant higher criticism (modernism), or we ‘get’ the narrative and typology but disregard the basic boundaries of responsible interpretation (postmodernism). Rich Lusk writes:

Biblical Theology requires us to learn to read the biblical narrative from within. We are insiders to the story of Scripture. It’s our story. We have to learn to read the Bible canonically. We have to allow the Word to absorb the world rather than allowing the world to absorb the Word. We have to take Scripture’s outlook as normative rather than imposing another worldview on our reading of Scripture. We must learn to read the Bible organically, in terms of itself. We should read the Bible the same way Peter, Susan, Lucy, and Edmond would read The Chronicles of Narnia: as a story not only for us, but about us.

Reading the Bible organically means reading it intertextually and typologically. Intertextual reading listens for echoes of and allusions to other passages within the canon, using Scripture to interpret Scripture. Typological reading looks for repeating patterns within the unfolding storyline of Scripture. Biblical typology is focused on totus Christus — the whole Christ, head and body, Jesus and the church. Typology means reading the Bible on its own terms, as a revelation of the suffering and glory of Christ (Lk. 24). As we move from type(s) to antitype, there is both correspondence and escalation.

Read his full article here.