Style Switching in the Jacob and Laban Narratives

This article argues that the biblical writers stylistically represented the regional speech of Aramean characters in the Jacob and Laban cycle of narratives in the book of Genesis (Genesis 24, 29, 30–31). Although there is an obvious example of style switching in Gen 31:47, recent research suggests that there are many other, though more subtle, examples of this technique embedded in these narratives. Until now, the research on the subject has been limited in scope, and it has tended to focus primarily on identifying style-switching forms. The present study goes beyond this by bringing to light the literary techniques that the biblical writers used in their stylistic representations of foreign speech.