The Stories of Genesis (review)

Hebrew Studies 36 (1995) 164 Reviews examination of an important aspect of the literature of ancient Israel that it might have been. Betsy Halpern-Amaru Vassar College Poughkeepsie, NY 12601 THE STORIES OF GENESIS. By Hennann Gunkel. pp. xx + 155. Vallejo, CA: BmAL Press, 1994. Paper, $15.95. Hermann Gunkel's Genesis commentary, Genesis iibersetzt und erklart (published in 1901 and revised in 1910) is one of the landmarks of biblical scholarship in the twentieth century. Virtually all of the analytical tools of what used to be called "Higher Criticism" (Le., those beyond the strictly linguistic or text-critical) were either invented or transformed in this book. The approaches that we call fonn criticism, tradition criticism, and redaction criticism descend directly from Gunkel, as do the modem revival of approaches from literary studies, folklore, and comparative religion. Gunkel was the first to integrate the discoveries of ancient Near Eastern literature into biblical studies; this task too continues apace. In many ways (as Gunkel said of his forebears Herder and Wellhausen) we walk in the path of Gunkel when we do biblical studies. The book under review is an English translation of the introduction to the third edition of Gunkel's Genesis commentary (from the German, 1910). The introduction to the first edition was translated into English in 1901 under the title The Legends of Genesis. Why, fourscore years later, translate the introduction to the third edition? The translator, the late John J. Scullion, notes that Gunkel expanded the introduction from seventy-one pages in the first edition to ninety-four pages in the third, incorporating much new material and research, and changing his mind on some key issues. Therefore the third edition (which is unchanged in the Gennan volume currently in print) ought to be the point of departure for Englishspeaking students and scholars. Moreover, Scullion's translation is more literalistic than the rather flowery English of the 1901 translation. On these grounds, Scullion's translation should become a standard reference work in English. Granting the value of this new translation, one reads the work primarily as a historical document. One is aware of the roads taken and not taken in Hebrew Studies 36 (1995) 165 Reviews biblical scholarship since Gunkel, and one wonders what the master would think today of his legacy. The most trivial matters, such as what labels one chooses to call the various genres of biblical literature, are still hotly contested , as in Scullion's introduction and afterward where he fitfully labors with the English words "story," "legend," "saga," "short story," "novella," and "myth" to describe the varieties of biblical narrative in Genesis. Gunkel's romantic and evolutionary presuppositions, in which the original literary forms must have been short and simple and sophisticated thinking necessarily late and secondary, still inform much biblical scholarship. In many ways modem scholarship still needs to emancipate itself from Gunkel's presuppositions, where antiquated, while learning from his broad insights and holistic view of biblical scholarship. In many places Gunkel's comments are as fresh and acute today as they were at the beginning of the century. He argues, in the chapter on "The Artistic Form of the Stories in Genesis," that literary study (in the modem sense of the term) is central to the task of biblical scholarship. "Whoever passes over these stories without attention to their artistic form is not only deprived of a great pleasure, but is also unable to carry out properly the scholarly duty of understanding Genesis" (p. 27). This is one area of work that has been largely neglected until recent years and still is lacking in all other modem commentaries on Genesis. What is remarkable about Gunkel is that he attended to literary qualities of the text (albeit in a thoroughly romantic idiom) while also attending to matters of history, religion, folklore , literary history, comparative relationships, and the "lower criticisms" of language and text. Unlike scholars of today, he pursued a view of biblical scholarship in which all of these approaches were complementary, in theory and in practice. Modem scholarship seems weak in this regard, with practitioners of one approach largely neglectful of most or all the others. Gunkel's view of scholarship, in...