reading the bible as literature: two questions for biblical critics

Journal of Literature & Theobgy, Vol. I, No. 2, September igSj

READING THE BIBLE ASLITERATURE: TWO QUESTIONS

FOR BIBLICAL CRITICSJohn Barton

A RECENTLY published layman's guide to medieval literature by J. A.Burrow, entitled Medieval Writers and their Work: Middle English Literatureand its Background 1100-1500 (Oxford, 1982), seems to me to raise some issuesthat might profitably engage the attention of biblical scholars. Twoquestions in particular deserve an airing. The first represents something of achallenge to the traditional kind of historical criticism with which allstudents of the Old and New Testaments are familiar, and suggests that ideasdrawn from the newer 'hterary' approaches to the Bible may turn out to beneeded even by those who retain a commitment to the historical-criticalmethod; the second, by contrast, casts some doubt on the more far-reachingclaims of these newer approaches and argues for a substantial continued useof historical criticism. I make no attempt to cast a balance at the end betweenthe advantages and drawbacks of the rival camps in contemporary biblicalstudy.

I. IS HISTORICAL CRITICISM ANACHRONISTIC?

The thinking behind this rather paradoxical question was greatly stimulatedby Burrow's work, but I can set it out more easily if I approach the subjectobliquely, first making a couple of general observations about hterarycriticism in all its branches, and then turning to biblical studies in particularby way of some pregnant suggestions made by Burrow.

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1. Aesthetic theories, and especially theories of literature, usually exhibit astrange paradox. Almost all attempts to state a general theory of aestheticsare ostensibly intended to cover ah1 kinds of art; but in practice they nearlyalways take their cue from the art of some particular preferred period ormovement, hi the realm of hterary theory this is very easy to illustrate.'Classical' or 'Romantic' theories of literature appear at face value to becompeting statements of the kinds of meaning it is possible for a work ofliterature—any work—to express. Broadly speaking, a classical approach toaesthetics will find the meaning of a hterary work in the interrelation of its

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parts, the formal character of its composition, and the universal applicationof the ideas it expresses. Romantic theories, on the other hand, concernthemselves chiefly with the thoughts or emotions of the poet, of which thework is seen as an almost compulsive expression. Both types of theory havetraditionally been 'intentionalist', but classical types have much more easilyled to an interest in the meaning which the text itself generates by its shapeand composition (as in the so-called 'New Criticism'), while Romantictheorists have usually located the work's meaning in the powerful emotionsof which it is no more than a vehicle. In principle, both ways of seekingmeaning in art should be universally applicable. In practice, as everyoneknows, critics have concentrated—sometimes very narrowly—on worksthat are specially congenial to their own theory. Thus literary theory passesby gradual stages into literary preference; or, to put it another way, literarypreference leads to the erection of a framework of theory which ensures thatonly the theorist's preferred types of writing will be reckoned as truly'literature'.

Thus the neo-classicism of Pound and Eliot and their followers did not inpractice lead to new ways of reading the Romantics, but rather to a shift inliterary taste, rehabilitating the Augustans and the more contrived produc-tions of the Metaphysicals. Thus also the more recent trends that outsiders, atleast, call 'structuralist' began as an attempt to see literary meaning asinhering in the conventional systems within which literature operates, butquickly turned into a revolutionary programme to change the sort ofliterature that should be produced. Theories which begin as apparentlydescriptive systems ('Literature is X') very soon become prescriptive codes('Good literature is X') and thence criteria for excommunication ('Only X isliterature'). We certainly now have enough historical distance from the earlynineteenth century to see this process clearly at work in the Romanticmovement, where Wordsworth's formulation in the Preface to LyricalBallads (1800), "All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerfulfeelings", very soon ceased to be a principle for understanding all goodpoetry and became the charter for writing poetry that understood itself inthese terms. Poets, in consequence, began to see their 'vocation' (itself rathera new idea) in terms of cultivating certain kinds of emotion which could bedistilled into verse, rather than in terms of acquiring various formal skills.And it was only a small step then to dismiss from the literary canon poetswhose own understanding of their task was clearly defective when measuredagainst such a standard: exeunt Pope and Dryden.

This means, what is no doubt obvious in any case, that the history ofliterature and the history of literary criticism are tightly inter-woven. Thereis generally a considerable overlap between the kind of literature beingproduced in any period, and the styles of aesthetic theory then in vogue.

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Poets in most ages are also critics, and as such subscribe to some particularview of what art is; and there is a reciprocal relationship between theirtheory and their practice. It is rarely easy to say which comes first.Wordsworth found himself writing verse that was difficult to account for ona 'classical' theory; he developed a theory that gave a greater place to thepoet's emotions; this in turn stimulated him and others to write what we callRomantic verse. Sometimes, it is true, there is a striking instance of literaturewhich we feel constrained to understand in terms of a theory that would nothave been available to the poet himself. Thus someone might want to saythat Donne was 'really' a Romantic poet even though he could not havearticulated to himself a Romantic theory of poetry, which had to wait twohundred years longer to find conscious expression. But for the most partthere is a strong correlation between theory and practice. This is the firstpoint to be made by way of introduction: that literary artists are usually alsoliterary theorists (not necessarily very articulately), and that theories ofliterature exercise a considerable constraint on the kinds of literature that getthemselves written in any given period.2. What critical approach should a modern critic use when studyingliterature from the past? Each age has had its own preferred style of criticism,and it is possible to chart the course that criticism has followed. One of thebest classification schemes which enables us to see how literary criticism hasdeveloped is provided by M. H. Abrams in his classic work The Mirror andthe Lamp (1953),1 and elsewhere I have summarised his scheme and tried toapply it to understanding the direction biblical criticism has taken and is nowtaking.2 Until the early years of this century the dominant theory used bymost literary critics since Wordsworth had been a Romantic one, in whichthe primary question critics would ask of any work was what we could learnfrom it about the author, and especially about his emotional or 'spiritual'life. But this approach has been succeeded in turn by the neo-classicism ofEliot and his school, already referred to, and more recently by various sortsof formalism, mainly originating in French structuralism. Most recent of allare forms of 'post-structuralism' such as reader-response criticism, in whichinterest moves away not only from the author but even from the work itselfand focuses instead on the process of reading, as a social institution.

hi biblical studies, for various reasons, a 'historical' approach having someaffinities with the Romantic style of secular criticism has reigned supremefor nearly two hundred years, and it is only quite recently that seriousbiblical critics have begun to take an interest in other modes of study, whichas yet are perceived by most biblical scholars as a single, undifferentiatedalternative to historical criticism. For practical purposes most biblical criticswill distinguish simply between a historical and a 'literary' approach—meaning by 'literary' any way of studying texts that concentrates on features

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immanent to the text itself. Some 'literary' approaches have, in fact, more incommon with the 'New Criticism' (this is true of B. S. Childs's 'canonicalapproach'), others with structuralism, but they all contrast so sharply withtraditional historical criticism that they seem, from the perspective of atraditional biblical scholar, to form a single family. For our present purposes,therefore, it will probably be sufficient to divide literary criticism similarlyinto 'historical' and 'non-nistorical' or 'aesthetic', understanding this secondcategory to include all theories of literature in which meaning inheres in thetext itself independently of the intentions or wishes of its author. This is acomparatively crude division within the complex world of secular literarystudies, but it will serve our immediate concerns well enough. In both theliterary and the biblical worlds the impetus towards 'non-historical' ('syn-chronic') study of texts has been born of a certain impatience with theapparent irrelevance of much traditional historical ('diachronic') study to acontemporary appreciation of texts. Both literary and biblical critics havecome to ask 'What does this text mean nowV; they have grown impatient ofan exclusive concern with what it meant when it was written. The author,after all, may be dead, but his work is still with us; why should we not readit as it stands, and leave the dead to bury the dead?

The decision that is required of the critic here is not one that can be madefrom within the discipline of critical study itself; it is what may be called arnetacritical question, involving various philosophical considerations thatcarry us well outside literary studies. It is no part of the purpose of this paperto try to resolve it. The point which is to be made here is simply that thecritic must make a decision; any critical judgments one may make on aliterary work or on a biblical text must be either historical or non-historicalin character. There is no middle way. To opt for the non-historicalalternative means that all suggestions about the text's meaning are to bejustified in terms of features within the text as read by a modern reader;questions of the author's intention, even of the author's possible intention, areirrelevant. Such a reading can never coherently be charged with anach-ronism, since it is not making historical proposals about how the text couldhave been understood when it was written: it is asking about its coherence asit stands. To opt, on the other hand, for the historical alternative is to becommitted to asking questions about what the author or authors of the textmeant it to mean; to be interested in the quest for ipsissima verba; to seek outpossible information about the literary conventions of the author's day; andto want to get inside the author's mind, and to find out what he thought hewas doing in writing such a work. These are the traditional agenda ofhistorical criticism, and they rule out suggestions for the meaning of textsthat rest on (for example) reading as a whole a work which is in realityfragmentary, or finding ambiguity in terms which when the text was

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written had only one meaning. The two approaches are thus mutuallyexclusive. At the metacritical level the choice between them is clear-cut andadmits of no compromise.

Starting with these two preliminary observations, I now want to suggestthat some very tangled questions arise as soon as we try to combine them.

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Neither a biblical nor a literary critic is faced with any great problems if heopts for the non-historical approach, and seeks to explicate a text byexamining its internal relations and structures. Historical criticism, however,needs to deal with a problem which is not readily apparent, but whichappears as soon as we tease out the implications of the preliminaryobservations above. The historical critic is presumably committed to takinginto account not only the words of a writer, but also his underlyingassumptions and beliefs. Unlike the non-historical, 'synchronic' or 'text-immanent' reading, historical criticism is not concerned merely with thesurface of the text, but with the historical conditions under which its authorwrote, including (among other things) the conventions of literature thatwere available to him and under whose constraints he operated. It is for thisreason that critics are not content to specify the genre of an old text byreference to modern genres, but take trouble to reconstruct and understandthe genres that were actually available when the text studied was beingwritten. One cannot understand Homer historically without some knowl-edge of the existence of epic as a genre; and since epic no longer exists as alive option in modern literature, this inevitably entails a good deal of workin the history of literature as a necessary preparation for understandingHomer. In the same way, historical biblical critics would claim that we canunderstand Proverbs only if we have some knowledge of the conventions ofancient wisdom literature, another genre or set of genres that has more orless ceased to exist. So much is reasonably obvious, and indeed it is attentionto historical questions of this kind that marks off proper historical criticismfrom the casual, uninformed reading of texts that so easily leads to shallowand anachronistic literary judgments.

Now among the conventions of literature within which any author of thepast worked, and which we try with gTeat effort to reconstruct as aprecondition of understanding ancient literature, will be some kind ofconsensus, however inarticulate, about what sort of thing literature is, whatit is to be a writer, and what kind of meaning literary works are supposed tohave: in short, some sort of theory of literature or theory of art. As I arguedin the first preliminary point above, the theory and practice of literature areintimately interlinked, and part of the mental furniture of any writer—which as historical critics we are obliged to attend to—is some notion of

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what literature is and of how it ought to be written. To revert to our earlierexample: to understand Wordsworth's poems, from a historical point ofview, we need to know what Wordsworth saw as the essence and functionof poetry. The fact that he embraced a 'Romantic' poetics is far fromirrelevant to understanding the actual poems he wrote. This, no doubt, isalso relatively uncontroversial. The information a historical critic needsincludes information about the basic approach to literature held by theauthor he is studying, whether that view is consciously articulated—as it wasby many of the Romantics—or is more a matter of unspoken assumptions,an unquestioned set of expectations which the writer had not consciouslyformulated even to himself. In this second case the critic's job is of courseharder, but may not be shirked on that account. This is part of what we needto know if we are to understand a poet fully.

The question, however, to which this apparently straightforward discus-sion is leading is this. What happens when the historical critic is studying anauthor who himself held (consciously or unconsciously) a non-historicaltheory of literature? Suppose we are reading an author whose own belief isthat the meaning of the very words he is in the act of writing does notdepend on his intentions and is not conditioned by the conventions oflanguage or literature operative at the time of writing, but inheres in thewords themselves as part of an artefact which passes, on its completion, fromthe author's control? Such a situation seems to make historical criticismdifficult, to say the least, since the author (who for the historical critic iscrucial) seems to be systematically refusing the role in which historicalcriticism casts him, and falsifying the reader's reasonable expectations. Theproblem is similar to that facing a critic trying to write 'classicist' criticism ofthe Romantics, only ten times worse. It may seem perverse, indeed itprobably is perverse, to analyse Wordsworth's poems according to classicalcriteria, asking all the time about the prosody or the construction instead ofconcentrating, as the poet himself would want us to, on the emotional statesbeing expressed. Many of Dr Johnson's criticisms of Shakespeare, whom weare apt to see as a kind of Romantic before this time, seem nowadays to betinged with some such perversity: for example, Johnson often applies aheavy test of verisimilitude, a 'classical' virtue in poetry, in places where tous (and no doubt to Shakespeare too) it appears inappropriate. But at leastclassical and Romantic theories share, as we have seen, a common commit-ment to the author's intention as a relevant criterion for meaning. Words-worth would have disagreed with Johnson about what sorts of intentionsauthors might properly have—Johnson required a desire to instruct,Wordsworth a longing to communicate profound emotion—but theywould have agreed, in general terms, that a poem meant what its authormeant by it. The contradiction between author and critic we are envisaging

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at the moment goes well beyond this. In the situation being imagined here,the critic is insisting on asking about the author's intended meaning, whileall the time the author is denying that such a thing exists at all. Sincehistorical criticism regards the author's own perception of his intentions ascrucial, the historical critic will presumably be constrained by the author'sview of the matter; yet to accept what the author says then seems to implythat historical criticism is actually inappropriate for the matter in hand, sincethe author's 'intention' is to produce an 'intentionless' work. This seems toyield the paradoxical conclusion that a rigorous pursuit of a historicalapproach would result, in such cases, in an obligation to practise a non-historical mode of criticism.

Stated in this way, this may appear merely as a logical paradox, andindeed my point has obvious affinities with problems in philosophical logicsuch as the self-referring propositions and riddles studied by Russell andFrege: the village barber who shaves all men who do not shave themselvesand is then frozen into logical paralysis when asked whether or not he shaveshimself, the Cretan who affirms that all Cretans are liars and therefore doesnot qualify for either our belief or our disbelief, and the rest of theKafkaesque characters in the logicians' menagerie. Such paradoxes are ofinterest, no doubt, to philosophers, but have little appeal for the averageliterary critic, still less perhaps for the average biblical critic, who might atthis point in our discussion merely reassert his traditional belief that criticismof criticism is a sophisticated excuse for ignoring the biblical text, and readno further. Whether or not the theoretical discussion of such convolutedissues is worthwhile, however, it cannot be said that the situation I haveconstructed is an unreal one. Indeed, a few examples will show, I hope, thatit is actually rather common, much commoner than one might suppose, andthat it raises a number of awkward practical questions which practical criticsof the Bible ought to give some thought to, since they affect even what wemight call the purely exegetical, no-nonsense level of biblical study.

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It is true that the examples which lie readiest to hand come from modernliterature. There are, for example, stories about T. S. Eliot which stress hisunwillingness to say what he meant by his poems except by repeating themin the same words: the best-known is the anecdote about the undergraduatewho asked him what he meant by "Lady, three white leopards sat under ajuniper tree", to whom Eliot replied that he meant "Lady, three whiteleopards sat under a juniper tree". Eliot was not, we may suppose, just beingawkward (though he was probably also being awkward); having released histext for public consumption, he did not believe that he retained any controlover its meaning. This has undoubtedly raised problems for critics of Eliot

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who wish nevertheless to relate his poems to his life and his beliefs. It hastended to force them into a rather modest style of criticism which seeks todiscover why he wrote the poems he did, rather than claiming to establishthe meaning of the poems. In other words, critics have been well aware ofthe sorts of difficulty I have in mind in the case of an anti-intentionalistauthor such as Eliot, and have had to work within the constraints thisimposes.

Even clearer examples could be found in the literature produced byauthors of a more or less 'structuralist' turn of mind. The tendency of criticsto concentrate on works amenable to their own literary theories means thatmost criticism of such writers comes from within the structuralist campitself, and so is not historical in character; but one of the problems traditionalcritics complain of in structuralist literature is precisely the one I havementioned, that it seems deliberately designed to elude their normal criticalcategories. The hatred of structuralism and all its works that can be found inrun-of-the-mill newspaper criticism of avant-garde fiction evinces a clearsense that such writers are not playing by the rules, that they are trying toput themselves above criticism. Writers who refuse to have intentions aboutthe meaning of their own works induce in the critic a sort of paralysis; theimpotence that the critic feels tends to come out in an undifferentiatedrejection of them all.

It would not be true, however, to say that the problem we are consideringis confined to the criticism of modern literature; and it is here, at last, that Iturn to the work of Professor Burrow, which makes this abundantly clear.As a medievalist who is sensitive to the pressures of modern literary theory,Burrow draws a number of striking contrasts between medieval and modernliterature—most of which are not controversial, but which are neverthelessnot always given due weight in criticism. For example, in describing the roleof the audience in the production of literature in the Middle Ages, he writes:

People in the Middle Ages treated books rather as musical scores are treatedtoday. The normal thing to do with a written literary text, that is, was toperform it, by reading or chanting it aloud. Reading was a kind of performance.Even the solitary reader most often read aloud, or at least muttered, the wordsof his text—performing it to himself, as it were—and most reading was notsolitary. The performance of a text waS most often a social occasion.3

Now this sense that the literary work exists in its performance, rather thanhaving its being on the written or printed page, has possible consequencesfor the location of literary meaning. Meaning is not so squarely in the handsof the author in an age which 'performs' its literature as it is in our entirelybookish literary culture.

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This complication is greatly enhanced if we attend to some of Burrow'sother comments on Middle English literature. Not only is there a differencein the way a written (or printed) text is received by its public; there is also adifference in what is supposed to be going on when a book is in production.For us, there is a clear distinction between 'writing' as a literary activity and'producing a book' as a physical or technological process. In Burrow'swords. "What is not composition is left to the compositor".4 We shouldthink it absurd for someone to say that he couldn't write any more novelsbecause he had forgotten how to mix the ink. But in the medieval situationwriting is essentially a continuum, stretching from the copyist to what weshould call the author, and any given writer may well move freely withinthat continuum. Even highly creative writers will unconcernedly copy otherpeople's words into their own texts; even copyists in a scriptorium willrearrange, condense, gloss, and emend. There is little sense of the integrity ofliterary works as the product of a single creative imagination. Indeed, to themodern reader's stupefaction, medieval writers often quite falsely disclaimthe very creativity for which we admire them, and make positive claims tobe collecting older material when they are in fact composing freely. "In thisgreat age of the manuscript book", Burrow writes,

conditions encouraged a certain 'intertextuality' or interdependence of texts.Few works have the free-standing independence to which modern writersgenerally aspire; most are related to other texts by some degree of compilation,or translation, or even simple transcription. Yet in those works which stillinterest us uiis dependence upon other texts proves to be partially illusory. Thewriter himself will often encourage the illusion of dependence by assuming therole of translator or compiler when he is in fact writing his own words 'inprime place'. The creative act of the auctor is concealed from the reader, as if toprotect or excuse it.5

Granted that this modest assertion of dependence may be little more thana literary convention the reasons for the convention still needs explanation;and it clearly lies in a markedly different conception from ours of what therole of a writer is. The historical critic's criterion of authorial intention as thekey to a text's meaning runs into as great difficulties here as it does withmodern literature in which intertextuality is a conscious ploy. To ask aboutthe detailed intentions of authors who understood themselves to beproducing for public performance texts that were primarily a compilationand re-ordering of older texts, is to ask an anachronistic question. To invokethe paradox again, only modes of criticism that are in some measure non-historical appear to be satisfactory on historical grounds.

I do not think the implications of this discussion for the study of the Bible,

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and especially of the Old Testament, are difficult to discern. To a con-siderably greater extent than with medieval literature, the texts comprisingthe Old Testament are either anonymous or pseudonymous, and a centuryand more of historical criticism has demonstrated that they are very oftencomposite, the accumulation of generations of transcription, of a more orless creative kind. Biblical critics attend partially and sporadically to theimplications of this. In general, we take it seriously as soon as we are surethat we are dealing with second and third generation accretions andredactions of a text, where we cease to ask what the text means and askinstead how it was read. But when we are handling the original composi-tion—the ipsissima verba of the first author, or the intentions of thegeneration that first told a story or sang a psalm—there we treat thereconstructed first stage in the text's growth as something freely andcreatively composed, something with an original authorial mind behind it.The secondary literature on both Testaments and on other ancient NearEastern literature is full of the suggestion that second-generation scribes andtransmitters did not see authorship as we do (often this is said as a way ofexonerating them from charges of plagiarism and false attribution); but thefirst authors of biblical texts tend to be treated much more as authors in themodern sense. But this will not do. There was not in fact a single golden age,in which there were real authors in the modern sense, followed by a longsecondary period of copyists. As in the Middle Ages, so in the days when ourbiblical texts were being written, the mentality which took no interest inoriginality and treated all words on paper as public property was universal.There is no reason to suppose that the authors of the little pieces of originalbedrock that we dig down to with such labour in the Pentateuch or theprophets had a different view of their own ipsissima verba than of anythingelse that was written or recorded for posterity. The picture one gets frommuch that is written on the Bible is that then as now there were originalcreative authors who had their own literary identity, but that they existed asislands in a scribal sea that overwhelmed their work once it had been extantfor a generation. But the islands may well be figments of an anachronisticmodern understanding of literature. The original authors were, perhaps,part of the scribal sea themselves, sharing the same view of authorship asthose who anonymously handed down and embellished what they hadwritten.

Let me make it clear that I am not saying we are necessarily wrong todetect the presence of creative innovators, even creative geniuses, among thebiblical writers. A writer may hold an understanding of his own role whichquite fails to do justice to his own originality—-just as Chaucer can be clearlyseen to have been more creative than he claims to be, living as he did in aliterary culture for which creativity had not been articulated or at least not

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identified as a virtue; or just as Donne might be claimed as a Romantic twohundred years before his time. I am not saying that we ought to adopt thekind of approach advocated by Scandinavian scholars between the wars,according to which the Old Testament is the deposit of an undifferentiatedtradition, and no more can be said about it. I am concerned with thenarrower question of what kinds of meaning it is fruitful or proper to lookfor in the biblical text, and am suggesting that, given the historicalpossibilities I have presented, it may be anachronistic to look for themeaning even of 'original' Old Testament writers by asking questions abouttheir intentions, their interests, what was going through their minds, whatinsights they wanted to communicate. Sometimes it may be that moreappropriate questions would focus on types of meaning that do not requirean author with intentions to mean them: the kinds of meaning, in fact, thatnewer, non-historical styles of criticism concentrate on. Let me develop thispoint a little further.

IV

The most obvious case in the Old Testament of texts which either had noauthors, in the ordinary sense, or whose authors were largely reworkingtraditional material and writing to a formula, is the Psalms. Andrew Louth,in his book Discerning the Mystery, rightly identifies the psalter as a problemfor traditional, author-centred historical criticism. He writes:

What is the meaning of these poems that we recite, and continue to recite afterthree thousand years or so? Is it what the original writer intended, or whatwhoever it was who introduced the psalm into the worship of the Templethought, or what? Clearly too restrictive an understanding of the meaning of apsalm will make nonsense of the recitation of the psalms and deny the basis ofthe spiritual experience of generations of Christians... The tendency of thehistorical-critical method has been to concentrate on originality and regardwhat is not original as secondary; but if we see here a process of inspiredutterance and reflection on—comment on—inspired utterance within thetradition, itself regarded as inspired, then we have a more complicated but, Isuggest, truer picture ... The art of understanding is more complicated, andricher, than an attempt to isolate the earliest fragments and to seek to understandthem in a conjectured 'original' context: we hear the voice and the echoes andthe re-echoes, and it is as we hear that harmony that we come to understanding.6

Even if we could reconstruct a level in the psalter, or identify someparticular psalms which really were the work of a highly original andcreative poet, rather than a highly stylized use of stock forms, that would notnecessarily render the historical question of the author's intention any easierto resolve. For our putative original psalmist would be most unlikely to have

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understood his own task as essentially different from that of all the otherpsalmists and psalm-tradents who failed to produce such original works.Most likely he will have fully shared their view of themselves as anonymouscraftsmen working to traditional designs; he will have had no particularsense that he was creating original literature to convey fresh ideas.

Now it seems to me that our task as historical critics is to take veryseriously such a writer's perception of his own function. To do so will,paradoxically, involve us in asking primarily questions about the text-immanent features such as motifs, stock themes, and underlying structures,which give the text a profound meaning that its original author wouldprobably have been unaware of: we cannot investigate his intention, since ina sense he had none. To ask about the meaning of such an anonymous text isto ask what meaning its construction generates, independently of anyintention on the poet's part; but a question like this would normally be seenas belonging to a non-historical mode of criticism! Yet the alternative seemsto be the loss of our intuitive sense that in the Psalms we are often in thepresence of great poetry. If we are to continue to believe this, once we haveproperly faced up to the probability that the actual authors of the Psalms hadno awareness of producing literature in this sense at all, it can only be byadopting an essentially non-historical type of critical approach: by seekingan explanation of the Psalms' literary merit that is located somewhere otherthan in the intentions of the psalmists. We shall have to believe, in C. S.Lewis's words, that there can be "poetry without a poet".7 It is impossible todo justice to this unless there can be some understanding between practition-ers of historical and non-historical criticism.

Something similar might be said of the book of Job. Historical criticismhas often sought to establish the earliest form of this work, or at least to tracethe various stages in its redaction. In recent years we have seen a muchgreater desire to read the book as it stands: to speak of the interests andintentions of the final redactor, and to deflect attention from the questions of'Introduction' that traditionally played so large a part in critical study of thebook. In the present context we might want to ask whether both approachesmay not be somewhat misguided. Suppose the book is not, and was not atany stage in its development, the expression of a particular writer's point ofview, but rather an assemblage (within the framework of a traditional tale,and in the form of a poetic drama) of a large number of'stock' positions onthe questions of theodicy with which each part of the work deals in someway or other? Is it not possible that the writer was trying to provide acomplete set—a sort of sampler—of all the arguments in common use onthis theme? If so, then it would no longer be very appropriate to look for the'original meaning' either of the first author or of the final editor. Job wouldnot be 'intentional' at all.

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It is not only in the poetic parts of the Old Testament that issues like thisarise. One of the great achievements of the redaction-critical approach hasbeen to make us see the narrative books of the Old Testament not so muchas evidence for historical events—though they may also be that—but ratheras the work of historiographers who had a message to convey. Classic casesof this would be the Deuteronomistic Historian as reconstructed by Noth,and the Yahwist as reconstructed by von Rad. Michael Goulder has raised aquestion about these redaction-critical studies, however, which suggests tome that there is still some unfinished business here. Discussing Noth'stheories about the work of the Deuteronomic Historian, he writes:

The completed D-corpus was never intended to be a literary work, laid by, likeHilkiah's book of the law, to be found during Temple renovations. It wasintended and used for liturgical proclamation.8

And in a similar vein, speaking of the complex pattern of inner-scripturalallusion that he believes can be found in Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, hefirst rejects the possibility that it is accidental, and then continues:

A second, if remote, possibility might be that the Chronicler was an artist:seeing the natural parallel between the Kings story and the Pentateuch, he haselaborated it with the touches we have seen. Such a theory does not impress.Who wrote, who read works of art in the Jerusalem of 350 B.C.? Thesuggestion seems foreign to the Jewish mind, unpractical and poindess.'

One does not need to subscribe to Goulder's own liturgical theory of theorigins of these two narrative works to see that he has put his finger on a realdifficulty in what may be called the consensus view of the redaction ofbiblical 'historiography'. The redaction-critical interest in the motives andintentions of the editors has, in fact, pushed to one side a question that earherform- and traditio-historical criticism had paid more attention to: thequestion of the intended use of lengthy narrative material in ancient Israel.Scholars sometimes speak of the D history's having been 'published' duringthe Exile: but in what sense pubhshed? Even if we do not adopt a theory ofliturgical origins for it, we can scarcely think of it as a literary history forcirculation among the literate elite, or for deposit in a public library. Whenwe ask what the redactor is trying to convey, what view of Israel's history hewould like his readers to accept, we need to be clear what kind of socialsetting we are presupposing. In what contexts in Israel during the exilic agecould one encounter such a work as the D history and be either convinced orunconvinced by its lines of argument? Form critics have written much aboutthe Site im Leben of the einfache Formen of which much of the Old Testamentis supposed to be composed; but what was the Sitz im Leben of long

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narrative works such as Joshua-Kings or Chronicles? It is quite true that wedo not know, and perhaps we should not waste time on unanswerablequestions; but it is also true that to speak of the intentions of the redactors ofthe D history tends to imply that we do know, since it tacitly presupposes aliterary culture not unlike our own, in which books are written by privateindividuals and read by the literate for pleasure or instruction. Was Israelitesociety in the exilic and post-exilic ages like that? Ought not this question tobe on the agenda of Old Testament studies?

II. IS THERE ANY LITERATURE IN THE OLD TESTAMENT?

By reminding ourselves of a number of aspects of the Old Testament onwhich, in themselves, there would probably be quite general agreement, wehave been able to question some of the claims of 'historical' criticism toexclusive appropriateness. Old Testament literature, to an even greaterextent than the literature of medieval England, is traditional literature, oftenanonymous, and making no claims to originality; it frequently amounts towhat might be called a creative transcription of an author trying to conveyhis own ideas. This already means that much of it is very different from whatwe normally call 'literature'. However, there may be other ways in which'literature' is not the most suitable description of the Old Testament, unlesswe define 'literature' much more broadly than is usual, and I want to suggestthat this equally undermines some more recent trends in biblical study,which in their eagerness to apply the 'non-historical' or 'literary' methodsdeveloped in modern criticism are tending to argue that more traditionalmethods are not sufficiently sensitive to the 'literary' character of the text. Ibegin with a summary of an important section of Burrow's book; most ofhis remarks seem to me to apply, mutatis mutandis, to the Old Testament.

'Literature' in most modern writing comprises, as Burrow says,poetry + prose + fiction + drama. There is a general agreement (despiteprotests from some literary theorists) to exclude discursive prose—scientific,philosophical, and technical writing—from 'literature'. "The huge andmiscellaneous corpus of non-fictional prose ... attracts relatively little atten-tion either from critics or from literary historians, except in so far as it assiststhe study of poems, novels and plays."10 The conceptual basis for this notionof li terature may be found in the combination of two factors to make up anidea we may call 'literariness', HttirariU. The first of these is a particular useof language, which might be summed up as follows: in literature languageceases to be merely a tool for the expression of thoughts, to which it seeks tobe so far as possible transparent, and becomes instead an object of interest inits own right. Iris Murdoch has put this point very clearly: "Literary writing

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is art, an aspect of art form. It may be self-effacing or it may be grand, but ifit is literature it has an artful intention, the language is being used in acharacteristically elaborate manner in relation to the 'work', long or short,of which it forms a part... A philosopher [on the other hand] must try toexplain exactly what he means and avoid rhetoric and idle decoration."11

The second factor in 'literariness' is a certain relation to truth. 'Literature',says Burrow,

is distinguished from history or philosophy or science as a fictional, or non-affirmative, or non-pragmatic, or hypothetical mode of discourse. It is notcommitted, in any ordinary, straightforward fashion, to the truth of the eventswhich it reports or the ideas which it propounds ... Northrop Fryc says: "Inliterature the standards of outward meaning are secondary, for literary worksdo not pretend to describe or assert, and hence are not true, not false, and yetnot tautological either."12

And Burrow quotes the classic statement of this position from Sir PhilipSidney's Apology for Poetry (1595): "Now for the poet, he nothing affirms,and therefore never lieth." This second idea is in origin Aristotelian: in thePoetics we find: "You might put the works of Herodotus into verse, and itwould still be a species of history"—that is, not poetry.

As Burrow shows, this concept of'literature' is hardjy to,be found in theMiddle Ages in England. Eloquence does not entail fictivity; high style isrhetoric rather than 'art'; the poet is under no self-denying ordinance whichbinds him, as a poet, to refrain from affirming. There are indeed works, suchas Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which are plainly literature in our sense,and where "final moral judgements are uttered, not by their author, but byGawain, Bertilak, and the Round Table; and, since their judgementsdisagree, the ultimate effect is pleasingly oblique and non-affirmative".13

But there are many other works which clearly observe ho convention offictivity: we find, says Burrow, "sermons in verse, instructions for parishpriests in verse, courtesy books and chronicles in verse, even poems onalchemy stained with chemicals".14 In practice most of such material isexcluded from what is studied under the heading 'Middle EnglishLiterature'. But there is a great deal of medieval writing that occupies a sortof middle ground; which we certainly want to claim for 'literature', yetwhich has as its aim a direct, rather than an oblique, relation to truth,especially theological or moral truth. A good example is Pearl, where, saysBurrow, "even the most literary of readers has to recognize ... that one ofthe immediate objects of the poem is theological truth".15 An even betterexample, if we move outside England, is Dante's Diuine Comedy. TheComedy contains lengthy passage of philosophical and theological exposi-

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tion; but its claims to be literature can hardly be called in question! It ispossible, as apparently some sixteenth century critics did, to read thesepassages in an Aristotelian manner, as imitations of philosophical or theologi-cal argument; to suggest that Dante, in so far as he is a true poet,

offers the reader not arguments and ideas but images of arguments and ideas; andthe reader, in so far as he is a true reader of poetry, will look not to beconvinced by arguments but to be delighted by their imitation.16

But to maintain this for the whole of the Comedy would be something of atour de force. It is much more likely that Dante, whose conception ofliterature was much broader than ours, wanted to state certain ideas that hediought were correct, and saw no reason why he should not do this withindie fictive framework of his poem. The notion that to do this was illicit wasnot available to him: he did not have our idea of HttiraritL

It is what seems to us this unhappy mixing of fiction and non-fiction, infact, that makes medieval literature difficult for the modern reader. One lastexample from Burrow will serve to sum up the difficulty and to lead into adiscussion of related problems in the study of the Old Testament:

Critics are often excessively eager... to insist that this or that passage ofphilosophical or theological exposition in a medieval poem is to be read'dramatically'—as the expression, that is, of the partial point of view either ofthe Narrator (a favourite figure) or of some character in the story. Suchimitation of ideas, of course, does occur, in medieval literature as elsewhere.The long speech in which Chaucer's Troilus argues the doctrine of predestina-tion (IV 958—1078) should certainly be read dramatically, as a philosophicalprojection of the hero's distress at the prospect of losing Criseyde ... Yet noteven Chaucer can be completely contained within die limits of literature,however hard critics may try. The Canterbury Tales (in its surviving fragmen-tary form) ends with the Parson's Tale and Chaucer's Retractation. The Parson'sTale is a treatise on the sacrament of penance. The literary approach to the Talewill emphasize its appropriateness to its teller, a priest who would haveadministered the sacrament, and also its dramatic fitness as die last tale beforethe pilgrims enter the holy city of Canterbury; but such attempts to reabsorbthe Tale into the spectacle of the Canterbury pilgrimage do not, I think, entirelyconvince the disinterested reader. Followed as it is by the Retractation, theParson's Tale seems to break out of die fictional world of the poem andconfront the reader directly with the realities of penance.17

II

Once again I do not think it requires much imagination to see that thestudent of the Bible faces problems similar to those encountered in the study

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of medieval literature. It is, again, primarily in the narrative books of theOld Testament that these problems arise; but that is serious enough, sincenarrative accounts for considerably more than half of the Old Testament,and similar questions cannot fail to be asked of the gospels and Acts, too.There is coming to be a general consensus among critics who prefer 'literary'readings of the narrative books, to the effect that it is inappropriate to usethem as sources of historical information at all. They are, it is said, works ofliterature, to be studied with the methods and aims proper to literature. Inpart this is, of course, a perfectly reasonable reaction against a fundamentalistinsistence on taking the biblical histories as 'evidence' or 'solid fact' andnothing more. In part, too, it is a reaction against the positivism of the fact-centred approach of the Albright school of'archaeological' criticism, who intheir •worst moments tended to treat the Old Testament as a mere repositoryof historical facts, and who seldom showed any understanding of the texts asliterature at all. Nevertheless there is a danger that a 'literary' approach tothe Bible could in its own way prove as anachronistic and inappropriate tothe texts in question as other methods have been, by ignoring the differencebetween ancient and modern conceptions of literature. For us, as we haveseen, a highly-wrought narrative style tends to carry implications offictivity; but this may not have been so for the biblical writers, any morethan it was for writers of medieval England.

I doubt if we can say of the writer of Genesis or even of 2 Samuel that he"nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth". My impression is that thewriters of the Old Testament have as good an understanding as we have ofthe difference between fact and fiction, and that the author of the 'SuccessionNarrative' may well have been intending to convey factual information, justas the author of Tobit, for example, was almost certainly consciously awareof writing fiction. Where they differed from us was in their understandingof the kind of writing appropriate to the two types; for them, the differencewas not closely correlated with a distinction between bald chronicling and'novel-like' characterization and dialogue. To ask, then, whether the eventsrecorded in works such as 2 Samuel actually occurred is not necessarily toreveal oneself as a hopeless philistine, insensitive to the questions proper toliterary criticism; it is rather, to recognize that modern literary criticism hasexcessively narrowed the range of questions deemed allowable, in a way thatcauses no serious distortions when modern literature is under examination,but is less appropriate in an ancient context.

What goes for the events recorded in Old Testament narrative may alsoapply to the speeches with which the historical books are studded. When inthe Deuteronomistic History we find lengthy sermons, placed in the mouthof Moses or Solomon or Ahijah, we may be sure that we are dealing withfiction, in the sense that they are inventions of the author or redactor; but

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this does not in the least imply that they are to be read obliquely, asimitations of what characters in the story might have said. On the contrary,the most notable feature of such speeches is their uniform house-style, andthe complete concord with sentiments expressed by the redactor whenspeaking in propria persona (as in Judges 2:11-21 or 2 Kings 17:7-23). Thereader is meant to take them seriously as statements of theological truth, notmerely to entertain them as fictive, 'in character' utterances. The same issurely true a fortiori of divine speeches. As a matter of literary history,Yahweh is a character in a story told by the Deuteronomistic editor, thePriestly Document, the Yahwist's history, or whatever it might be. But no-one in ancient times ever saw him in that way, and if anything is certain it isthat the authors in question meant, in these speeches of God, to convey tothe reader or hearer a serious and non-fictitious divine address. The omni-science of the narrator, which extends even to what Yahweh said in privateto Moses or to Solomon, is meant by the actual author to be taken at facevalue; the 'Narrator', whose distinctness from the author himself is soessential to most modern literary criticism, does not have this kind ofindependent existence for either the readers or the authors of the biblicalhistories, I would suggest. Consciously fictive narrative does exist in the OldTestament and Apocrypha, but hardly in the primary history-works of thePentateuch and Former Prophets. All this means that the application ofmodern literary techniques to this material is fraught with hazard.

III. CONCLUSIONS

The upshot of the present discussion is necessarily a certain coolnesstowards most theoretical positions about the kind of criticism appropriate inbiblical studies. I have tried to suggest (with the help of Burrow'silluminating discussion of medieval literature) that the books of the OldTestament do not fall easily within our category 'literature'. On the onehand, they are in most cases anonymous, lacking the stamp of a singlecreative mind, and do not themselves operate with the notion of an 'originalmeaning' which is so crucial for traditional historical criticism. That suggeststhat biblical critics need to learn from their secular colleagues a mode ofcriticism appropriate to authorless, non-intentional texts. On the other hand,where we can speak of the intentions of the biblical writers, those intentionsmay well include a desire to communicate facts or ideas in a quite directway. Not all points of view expressed, not all events reported in biblicaltexts are meant to be taken obliquely, as the ideas or actions of characters in afiction; for these authors the 'Narrator' is sometimes thought to be God,who addresses the reader directly and can be expected to have an accurategrasp both of historical fact and of theological truth. And that means thattraditional kinds of criticism cannot be simply set aside in the interests of a

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'literary' (synchronic, holistic, or fictive) reading. As promised at thebeginning, I have no intention of quantifying the claims of the two sides tothis question; but I am sure at least that both need weighing. The resultwould surely be a greater pragmatism in the use of the various methods atthe disposal of biblical scholarship. By becoming more sensitive to questionsof literary convention, genre, and audience expectation—the sorts of issuesthat interest 'literary' critics—traditional historical scholarship could, I havesuggested, actually become more historical, not less, and could avoid the riskof anachronism in understanding writers who lived in a very differentliterary culture from our own. On the other hand, those of a more 'literary'turn of mind need to remember that 'literature' has not always been thetightly-defined thing it is now; in the past it has often included discursivewriting which did not confine itself to a fictitious world with its own laws,and sought to be justified in terms of truth-claims, as well as of what we nowthink of as 'merely aesthetic' features. Both styles of criticism have atendency to narrow our vision of what is actually in the Bible. Like all otherkinds of criticism, they tend to recast the material they are studying in theirown image. We cannot clear our minds of all literary presuppositions whenwe approach the Bible, but it cannot be a bad thing to spend timeoccasionally clarifying what our presuppositions are.

REFERENCES

1 See especially chapter i. 9 M . D . Goulder, Midrash and Lection in2J. Barton, 'Classifying Biblical Criticism', Matthew (London, 1974), 218-9.JSOT 29 (1984), 19-35. See also my 1 0 Burrow, op. cit., 12.Reading the Old Testament: Method in Bibii- u In, Men of Ideas: Some Creators ofContem-cal Study (London, 1984). porary Philosophy (London, 1978), 265.

3Burrow, op. cit., 47. (This volume contains transcripts of series4Ibid., 29. of television interviews, under the same5Ibid., 34. title, conducted by Brian Magee with6 A. Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay various leading philosophers.) See also

on the Nature of Theology (Oxford, 1983), Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Intro-108. auction (Oxford, 1983), 1-16.

7 E. M. W. Tillyard and C. S. Lewis, The 12 Burrow, op. cit., 13.Personal Heresy: A Controversy (London, 13 Ibid., 18.1939), 2nd edition 1965, 16. MIbid. , 19.

8 M . D. Goulder, The Evangelists' Calendar: " Ibid., 21.A Lectionary Explanation of the Development " Ibid., 21—22.of Scripture (London, 1978), 114. " Ib id . , 22-23.

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reading the bible as literature: two questions for biblical critics

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