Who Wrought the Bible?: Unveiling the Bible's Aesthetic Secrets

Notes

I 1. For the dynamics of the textual continuum see, among others, Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” NLH  (): –; Wolfgang Iser, “Interdeterminacy and the Reader’s Response in Prose-Fiction,” in Aspects of Narrative, ed. J. H. Millen (New York: Columbia University Press, ), –; Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ); Menahem Perri, The Semantic Structure of Bialik’s Poetry: A Contribution to the Theory of Meaning Evolvement in the Literary Text’s Continuum (Tel Aviv: Siman Kri’a, ); Menahem Perri, “The Dynamics of the Literary Text: How the Order of Presentation Dictates the Meaning of the Text,” Hasifrut  (): –; Jacob Steinberg, Leket Sipurim (The Blind) (Jerusalem: Tarbut Ve-Hinuch, ); Meir Sternberg,“The Structure of Suspense: Plot and the Detective Story,” Hasifrut – (): –; S. E. Fish, “Literature and the Reader: Effective Stylistics,” NLH , no.  (): –; Yair Mazor, “Unearthing Dynamics in the Varied Poem,” Rosh  (): –; Yair Mazor, The Dynamics of Motifs in S. Y. Agnon’s Fiction (Tel Aviv: Dekel Academic Press, ). The theoretical observations and definitions that are presented in the beginning of the introduction are also addressed in Yair Mazor, Israeli Poetry of the Holocaust (Madison , NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, ). 2. For the term “irony” see, among others, Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics , ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), s.v. “Irony”; Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), –; Charles E. Bressler, Literary Criticism (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, ), –. 3. For the narrator in fiction see Norman Friedman, “The Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept,” in Approaches to the Novel, ed. R. Schorer (San Francisco: Chandler, ), ; Joseph Ewen, “Writer, Narrator, and Implied Author,” Hasifrut – (): –. 4. For biblical quotes throughout this work, I have used several translations (including my own) of the Bible to produce a version that best does justice to the original Hebrew text. 5. For the poetic nature of parallelism see Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, s.v. “Parallelism”; Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic  Notes Books, ); Shmuel Shrira, Introduction to the Bible (Jerusalem: Mevo’ot, ), s.v. “Biblical Interpretation”; Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, ); Zvi Adar, The Biblical Narrative (Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, ); Merir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ); Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, eds., The Literary Guide to the Bible (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ). 6. W. C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ). C . O M M I 1. For a discussion of the rhetorical device of frustrated or thwarted expectations, see Meir Sternberg, “Retardatory Structure, Narrative Interest, and the Detective Story,” Hasifrut – (): –; Yair Mazor, A Well-Wrought Enlightenment: The Compositional Poetics of the Hebrew Enlightenment Narrative [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Papyrus Press of Tel Aviv University, ), –. 2. For metonymy and metaphor, see Joseph Ewen, Dictionary of Literary Term, Academon (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, ), –; Babette Deutch, Poetry Handbook (New York: Harper & Row, ), –; Azriel Ukhmani, Themes and Structures (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Ha’poalim, ), ; Patricia Harkin, Acts of Reading (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, ), , –. 3. For a discussion of various linguistic/historical strata of the Torah (J, E, P, D [Deuderonomist ]) see Encyclopedia Hebraica, ed. Joshua Prawer (Jerusalem: Encyclopedia Publishing Company, ), vol. , s.v. “Bible”; Richard Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, ), –; Yair Hofman, Aspects of Modern Biblical Criticism (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense, Publishing House, ), –; Julian Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel (New Haven, CT: Meridian Books, ). 4. For a discussion of the qasida, see Stephan Sperl, Mannerisms in Arabic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ; G. E. von Grunebaum, ed., Arabic Poetry: Theory and Development (Weisbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, ), , , , , ; Israel Levin, “Lamenting over the Ruins and the Wandering Nocturnal Image,” Tarbitz  (): ; Alex Preminger, ed., Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), s.v. “Arabic Poetry,” ; Philip Hitti, History of the Arabs (New York: St. Martin’s Press, ), –. 5. See, for example, Juda Keel, The Book of Samuel [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, ), . 6. Menahem Perry and Meir Sternberg, “The King through Ironic Eyes: The Narrator ’s Devices in the Biblical Story of David and Bathsheba and Two Excursuses on the Theory of the Narrative Text,” Hasifrut  (): –. Moshe Garsiel takes issue with some aspects of their interpretation. See Moshe Garsiel, The Kingdom of David (Tel Aviv: Don-Israel Antiquities Department Publication, ), –. 7. Here one notices a triple structure descending from the highest military rank (Joab, the chief of...