Tragedy and Biblical Narrative: Arrows of the Almighty (review)

Hebrew Studies 36 (1995) 149 Reviews that the canon of the Hebrew Bible was fixed only "in the first and second centuries of the Common Era" (p. 65) is one of several points where he depends upon antiquated scholarly opinion. Nonetheless, Bruns perceptively if speculatively supposes that when Josiah recognized the claims of "Deuteronomy" (Urdeuteronium), he not only received illumination for himself, but he also produced, in combination with Hilkiah's priestly tradition , class struggles and national politics, a "canon" that helped tame prophetic tradition. As a biblicist, I found Bruns' reflections on the hermeneutics of literature , though sometimes difficult. nonetheless refreshing for its perspective outside of my own discipline. Speaking as one for whom God is not dead (contra Nietzsche) and for whom accordingly man is still alive (contra Kojeve and Foucault), I am less willing than Bruns to accept postanthropological "hermeneutics of freedom" for which the choice between truth and freedom is essentially a SUbjective, political one. Nonetheless, those of us trained in a narrow brand of "scientific biblical exegesis" would do well to broaden our hermeneutical horizons along the lines that Bruns suggests so as to incorporate more reflection and application. Joe M. Sprinkle Toccoa Falls College Toccoa Falls, GA 30598 TRAGEDY AND BIBLICAL NARRATIVE: ARROWS OF THE ALMIGHTY. By Cheryl J. Exum. pp. xiv + 206. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Cloth, $49.95. In everyday usage the term "tragedy" describes a wide range of untoward events or stories, and distinctions between the tragic and pathos or melodrama are blurred. Often in more technical literary study the term has a more restricted usage. Sometimes it denotes a particular form of literature , while others use it to describe a tone or vision (as in Richard Sewell's classic study). Exum seeks to employ a more expansive sense of "tragedy" in her literary study. Her use is "heuristic: it provides a way of looking at texts that brings to the foreground neglected and unsettling aspects. nagging questions that are threatening precisely because they have no answers" (p. 2). Her concern is less to come to some restrictive defmition of "tragedy" as an abstraction than to gain some sense of the shapes of the "tragic" as readers engage selected biblical texts. She confines her study to narratives Hebrew Studies 36 (1995) 150 Reviews from Judges and 1-2 Samuel (Job is treated in her introductory chapter). Her movement from Saul to Jephthah and his daughter and the house of Saul and lastly to David is from texts in which tragic aspects are sustained to those with at best tragic dimensions or potential. In her treatment of the "tempered tragedy" of the rise and fall of Saul she suggests Saul experiences the hostility of God, the spillover of a divine hostility to monarchy that makes Israel's first king "kingship's scapegoat" (p. 35). Saul is haunted by dark forces both without and within; he is guilty but not evil, and it is this disparity between his fate and his flaw that leads others also to explore the tragic qualities of the story of Israel's first king. Exum's work is broadly in line with that of others, yet her reading of Saul's story in interplay with Samson's, her focus on the character of God in this story, and the relation between God and the tragic Saul enrich our understanding of this narrative. In light of the text we have, especially in its larger literary context, one wonders if Exum is reading a story embedded in the one before us. At the very least there are attempts to transform the tragic Saul into a villain in an interpretative tradition that begins in the biblical text itself. Exum has decided not to address such diachronic issues. If the deity is hostile in Saul's story, he is absent in that of Jephthah and his daughter. The deity may be silent when sought by Saul, but his stance in relation to events is clear; in Judges 11-12 the deity's absence represents a refusal to take a position in relation to events. This is reflected, for example , in Exum's compelling reading of Jephthah's vow as possibly...