Narrative in the Hebrew Bible (review)

Book Reviews 129 captioned statistical tables (pp. 42-45); a ten-day period translated as "decade" (p. 98); the Folkspartei [People's or Folkist Party, a diaspora nationalist party] rendered as "Jewish Rural Party" (p. 111). Most of these weaknesses should be viewed in historical context. Given the abyss that traditionally separated Polish and Jewish societies, and the past fifty years spent in the never-never-Iand of communist "scholarship ," today's Polish initiatives in relation to Jewish history are above all to be marveled at. The next level in the development of our knowledge will be attained by Polish-as well as, it is to be hoped, western Jewishscholars , trained in alI the languages and traditions required to unravel the history of this extraordinarily creative, and tragic, Jewish civilization. Michael Steinlauf Department of History Franklin & Marshall College Narrative in the Hebrew Bible, by David M. Gunn and Danna Nolan Fewell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. 263 pp. $55.00 (c); $16.95 (p). This book is unique. There are the customary chapters on characters and narrators, plot, literary devices, and readers. There are also detailed and creative readings of many biblical narratives (e.g., Genesis 1-3, 11-22, 38; Judges 1, 10-12; Daniel 3; and, Jonah). However, this reviewer agrees with Gunn and Fewell's assessment that what differentiates their book is the hermeneutical assumption that meaning is always the reader's creation (p. xi). The most important thing to understand about this book, then, is that it is a poststructuralist approach to reading biblical narratives. Gunn and FewelI situate their hermeneutical ideas vis-a-vis historical criticism, which usually aims at determining the meaning of any text. However, Fewell and Gunn argue that there are no definitive meanings for texts. As they put it: The process of establishing meaning is never complete, since the meaning of one word is always dependent on that of another, in an infinite cycle. Likewise the possibilities ofcontext are potentially infinite, since recognizing a text's context is not only a matter of locating words in a text but also of locating the reader ... in a personal and social context. The meaning of words is therefore a constant deferral. Together, difference and deferral produce the instability of language .... (p. 155). 130 SHOFAR Winter 1995 Vol. 13, No.2 The context is infinite because all texts are related to every other text. "Intertextuality," they explain, "is a relationship that might exist between any two texts. The reader, rather than the text, makes the connections" (p. 165). There is, then, no such thing as "the text," except as a heuristic notion. Both text and reader are "networks" of many theological, ideological, and social discourses (pp. 147, 193). Given this view of intertextuality, Fewell and Gunn can then argue that all readers make connections between texts according to their ideologies. This ultimately means "that texts are not objective representations of reality, but representations of particular value systems" (p. 191). For the reader/critic, then, any "hermeneutics or critical theory is logically prior to actual interpretation" (p. 9). For historical-critics this argument means several things. First, the objectivity of historical criticism must be denied. Historical-critical methods may be consistent and rigorous, but they can never produce "what actually happened" or what a text "really meant" (p. 9). Secondly, in biblical narrative there is always an imaginative distance between "what actually happened" and its narrative representation. The historical critic too only has imaginative access to historical events through his or her theory. Therefore, both the biblical narratives and any historical-critical writing about them are akin to writing fiction. "Indeed," contend Fewell and Gunn, "we could argue that there is no such thing as 'what actually happened'; there are only stories (or histories) of what happened, always relative to the perspective ofthe storyteller (historian).... Thus the problem of distinguishing between 'history' and 'fiction' is generally acute" (p. 6). Fewell and Gunn are not contending that nothing actually happened; they only mean that the notion of "hiStory" is "better thought of as an ideological and social construct, inevitably subjective, and existing on a continuum with notions such as 'myth' and 'fiction'" (p. 11). Finally...