Biblical Narrative and the Death of the Rhapsode

2. FROM SONG TO STORY: THE GENESIS OF NARRATIVE IN JUDGES 4 AND 5

17 •2• FROM SONG TO STORY: THE GENESIS OF NARRATIVE IN JUDGES 4 AND 5 I have described earlier the very special manner which Bergotte had, when he spoke, of choosing and pronouncing his words. Morel, who for a long time had been in the habit of meeting him at the Saint-Loups’, had at that period done “imitations ” of him, in which he exactly mimicked his voice, using just the words that Bergotte would have chosen. And now that he had taken to writing, Morel used to transcribe passages of “spoken Bergotte,” but without ¤rst transposing them in the way which would have turned them into “written Bergotte.” Not many people having known Bergotte as a talker, the tone of his voice was not recognised, since it differed from the style of his pen. —Marcel Proust, Time Regained (In Search of Lost Time) The earliest symptom of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times. What distinguishes the novel from the story (and from the epic in the narrower sense) is its essential dependence on the book. The dissemination of the novel became possible only with the invention of printing. What can be handed on orally, the wealth of the epic, is of a different kind from what constitutes the stock in trade of the novel. —Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” For behind that half-page we are to imagine a writer racking his brains for a plausible way to get the story started; we are to imagine the fussing over point of view; the agonizing over probabilities . . . ; the wrestling with the sequence in which the characters are to be named, described, and set talking. We are to fancy (to transpose into modern terms) Jamesian beginnings , Faulknerian beginnings; the 500-word draft crumpled in a melodrama of despair; the 8,000-word draft composed, pruned, retouched, ripped up; the half-written circuitous opening, with its easy meditations on chance and destiny, never completed; the dismal brooding; and the joy. Hugh Kenner, The Stoic Comedians 18 Biblical Narrative and the Death of the Rhapsode On the Origins of Biblical Narrative Ever since the publication of Albert B. Lord’s book The Singer of Tales, his classic comparative study of Homeric and Serbo-Croatian oral epic, various attempts have been made to apply his theories not only to biblical poetry but to biblical narrative as well.1 More recent literary studies by Robert Alter, Adele Berlin, and Meir Sternberg,2 however, have seriously called into question whether one can understand the minute articulations of biblical prose as remaining, in any meaningful or functional way, part of an oral tradition—though some biblical poetry admittedly does evince signs of oral composition and may well originate in an oral-formulaic tradition .3 Meanwhile a related debate has developed around the notion of a conjectured ancient Israelite epic. Frank Moore Cross, for one, has not hesitated to speak of the Bible in terms of “epic”: “In the case of the Epic materials . . . we are inclined to reconstruct a long and rich poetic epic of the era of the league, underlying JE.”4 While Shemaryahu Talmon (among others) has questioned the applicability of such a term to biblical literature, he mainly objects to the broader cultural connotations that adhere to the idea of “epic.”5 Thus, even when criticizing what he sees as the extravagances of Lord’s comparative method, he does not attack the heart of Lord’s theory, namely, the dynamics of oral-formulaic composition.6 Even if, for the sake of argument, one brackets the term “epic,” the possibility Cross raises of an ancient Israelite oral tradition remains.7 Inasmuch as the Ugaritic narrative poems and the Bible’s own earliest poetry—compositions exhibiting signs of oral-formulaic composition— provide us with our best glimpse into Israel’s pre-biblical narrative traditions , biblical prose narrative most likely originated in and grew out of these and/or similar traditions, whence Cross’s notion of “epic sources”: “J and E as variant forms of an older, largely poetic epic cycle.”8 For this reason the prose story in Judges 4 and its “synoptic parallel” in Judges 5, the Song of Deborah, provide an interesting test case.9 One can observe in synchronic fashion the consequences following upon the biblical composer’s choice of either a prose or poetic medium. Furthermore , since Judges 5 is almost certainly the earlier text, the differences between...