Homeric and Ancient Near Eastern Intertextuality in 1 Samuel 17

Julia Kristeva, the philosopher and literary critic who advanced the concept of intertextuality and coined the term, once opined that “any text is the absorption and transformation of another.”¹Hyperbolic though it may be, the statement is fundamentally true: even the compositions that impart a predominantly novel message do not emerge in a vacuum; they draw upon existing conceptual and artistic frameworks, if only to transcend them in favor of fresh paradigms. In this sense, any text is a part of a cultural continuum that extends to the very beginnings of humankind.

It is, however, anything but easy to trace that continuum, and not just because most of the links are usually missing. An even greater impediment is the uncertainty that inevitably surrounds the nature of the relationship between two texts that display what look like parallels. No matter how convincing, these do not necessarily attest to a genetic connection by way of conscious or unconscious mimesis, as the possibility of both compositions drawing from the same diffuse pool of motifs, tropes, concepts, and thought patterns should also be seriously considered, and even accidental convergence cannot be discounted. Further complicating the picture, parallels often point in several directions, sometimes toward texts composed in different languages and belonging to different cultures. Since the relative dating of ancient texts—and accordingly the mimetic vector—may likewise be indeterminate, meaningful discussion of intertextuality with regard to such texts would appear beset by ambiguities to the point of being doomed from the outset.²

The Hebrew Bible is a case in point. Its texts have been massively absorbed and transformed in Western culture, and more recently beyond it, but until this culture began rediscovering the oeuvres of ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hittite, Ugaritic, and other literatures, no one could even suspect that the Hebrew Bible may in its turn have absorbed and transformed many of them. Multiple parallels traced between these literatures and the biblical corpus would seem to indicate as much; but what is the import of these parallels? Which of them can be plausibly interpreted as suggesting that the Hebrew Bible mimics an antecedent composition and thus serves as a link between it and modernity? And what exactly are these antecedents? Apart from a few relatively clear-cut cases, the aforementioned uncertainties make these questions difficult to answer.

A promising way out of the impasse is offered by the approach developed by NT scholar Dennis R. MacDonald about a decade ago. He formulated six criteria against which to check whether a certain composition imitates another:

The criterion of accessibility, or availability, assesses the likeliness that the author had access to the hypotext. The more widespread the proposed target of imitation, the stronger the case for imitation. . . .

The second criterion, analogy, seeks to place the proposed . . . parallels within a tradition of imitations of the same model. The more often ancient authors imitated a particular story, characterization, or plot element, the more likely the case that [the studied text] did too. . . .

Density, criterion three, pertains to the volume of contacts between two texts . . . . The fourth criterion, order, is related to density insofar as it assesses the sequence of the parallels. The more often two texts share content in the same order, the stronger the case for literary dependence.

The fifth criterion is distinctiveness. Occasionally two texts contain distinguishing characteristics, such as peculiar characterizations, or a sudden, unexpected change of venue, or an unusual word or phrase. . . .

The final criterion is interpretability, or intelligibility, the capacity of the proposed hypotext to make sense of the hypertext. This may include the solution to a peculiar problem that has eluded other explanations. It also may include emulation, or transvaluation. . . .³

The present article uses these criteria to assess the intertextual status of the account of David’s victory over Goliath in 1 Samuel 17. Modern scholars mostly highlight the parallels between this account and single-combat scenes in the Iliad.⁴ Moreover, two relatively recent publications interpret the parallels in question in terms of a mimetic process in which the biblical hypertext emerged at least partly...