Friends on the Way: Jesuits Encounter Contemporary Judaism

From Midrash to Rashi to Contemporary Narrative Exegesis (R. Alter, M. Sternberg, et al. ): Continuity in Jewish Biblical Reading

From Midrash to Rashi to Contemporary Narrative Exegesis (R. Alter, M. Sternberg, et al.): Continuity in Jewish Biblical Reading Jean-Pierre Sonnet, S.J. It is this extraordinary presence of the [biblical] characters, this ethical fullness and the mysterious possibilities of exegesis that originally meant transcendence to me.1 —E. Lévinas In 1968 an article was published in the Israeli periodical Ha-Sifrut by two young scholars from Tel Aviv University, Menakhem Perry and Meir Sternberg, which stirred up a hornet’s nest of protest and nevertheless engaged biblical exegesis in a new chapter of its history.2 The article’s title is ‘‘The King through Ironic Eyes: Biblical Narrative and the Literary Reading Process.’’3 It is a verse-by-verse analysis of 2 Samuel 11–12, the story of David and Bathsheba, demonstrating that an elaborate system of gaps between what is told and what must be inferred places the reader before (at least) two possible interpretations, both of them compatible with the narrative’s data. According to the first interpretation, Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband, was far from knowing that King David had committed adultery with his wife, whereas according to the second, he was well aware of it. Each one of the two mutually exclusive hypotheses entails a set of secondary hypotheses concerning the motives and states of knowledge of the principal characters (Uriah, David, and Bathsheba). 112 / Jean-Pierre Sonnet, S.J. According to Perry and Sternberg, a structural analogy exists between the story told in 2 Samuel and Henry James’s deliberate ambiguity in The Turn of the Screw: it is possible to uphold both that James’s young heroes really see phantoms and that they are victims of an hallucination. The most recurrent critique addressed to Perry and Sternberg was that they were analyzing a biblical narrative that was religious, moral, and didactic in intention and that it was therefore out of place to see in it any affinity whatsoever with the multiple forms of irony that we moderns so love. Perry and Sternberg responded with a rejoinder entitled ‘‘Caution: A Literary Text!’’ arguing that they did not apply to the (Hebrew) Bible contemporary literary criteria but that they had meticulously identified the general norms of biblical narrative— norms that the episode of David and Bathsheba illustrates in a particular way. The first of these biblical techniques is the narrative gap: it is the narrator’s skill to involve the reader in the construing of the sense of the narrative by deliberately skipping some elements of the chronological and causal chain, starting with the motives and states of mind of the characters.4 The inquiry on the process of reading of 2 Samuel 11–12 is now a chapter of The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, Sternberg’s masterwork published in 1985.5 Unacceptable to some minds, the essay on David and Bathsheba turned out to have been seminal for others since its initial publication as an article in 1968. Robert Alter, professor of comparative and Hebrew literature at the University of California, recognizes that he owes his involvement in the study of the literary art of the Bible to the stimulation given by Perry and Sternberg’s pathbreaking article. Alter’s intellectual engagement led to the two classics of biblical literary scholarship, The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981) and The Art of Biblical Poetry (1985).6 Alongside Sternberg and Alter, a pioneering generation—Moshe Greenberg, Shemaryahu Talmon, Jacob Licht, Adele Berlin, Shimon Bar Efrat, Uriel Simon, Moshe Garsiel, Yair Zakovitch, and Frank Polak, to name but the major figures —got down to work. From Midrash to Rashi to Contemporary Narrative Exegesis / 113 Mapping out anew the biblical landscape, these scholars took into account the intuitions already expressed by two precursors, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, particularly sensitive to the Bible’s Leitwortstil—the way the biblical narrative associates a set of catchwords to the unfolding of the plot.7 In this reading venture, the Jewish exegetes found partners in the Christian world, such as Luis AlonsoScho ̈kel, Jan Fokkelman, James Ackerman, and Robert Polzin. In their dialogue, both groups referred to the first chapter of Mimesis, the essay by Erich Auerbach (originally published in 1946), in which the antithetical modes of representing reality in Genesis and the Odyssey are compared at length.8 Upstream of this dialogue, it is the Jewish moment of the contemporary ‘‘narrative’’ revolution that I...