SOURCE: "Torah as Narrative and Narrative as Torah" in Old Testament Interpretation: Past, Present, and Future; Essays in Honor of Gene M. Tucker, edited by James Luther Mays, David L. Petersen, and Kent Harold Richards, Abingdon Press, 1995, pp. 13-30.

[In this essay, Eskenazi surveys the literary approaches to the Torah that have recently emerged in an effort to understand how they provide for a fuller religious and historical appreciation of the text.]

When, in time to come, your children ask you, "What mean the decrees, laws, and rules that YHWH our God has enjoined upon you?" you shall say to your children, "We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt and YHWH freed us.…" (Deut 6:20, TANAKH)

Poised ready to possess the promised land, Israel on the plains of Moab receives, again, the command to tell the story of its past: "We were slaves …" The meaning of the "decrees, laws, and rules of YHWH" is disclosed through the story, the telling and re-telling of which is both remembering and re-membering.

When all Israel comes to see the face of YHWH your God in the place where [God] will choose, you will read this Torah. … Gather the people, the men and the women and the little ones and the stranger within your gate, in order that they will hear and learn … and their children who did not know will hear and will learn.… (Deut 31:11-13)

The Torah is meaningful memory written explicitly for a purpose: to engage and teach a community (and each member within it) how to live in relation to God. The story is not a dispassionate report of what happened, merely told to satisfy curiosity. It seeks to promulgate a public memory of a shared past and define a common future. And the medium it uses, narrative, is inseparable from the messages it seeks to convey.

What, then, are the critical, responsible, effective ways to understand the Torah? Must one stand outside and gaze at it objectively or may one enter its universe as a participant? What skills must one have to analyze narrative, especially this one? And what does it mean "to understand" such a text? One of the major developments in biblical studies in the last twenty-five years is the emergence of responses to these questions in which literary, rather than historical, criteria predominate.

The Hebrew word Torah means "teaching" (note the singular). It refers in its narrower sense to the first books of the Bible, known also as the Pentateuch or the Five Books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). The translation of Torah as "Law" (as in "the Law and the Prophets") obscures the narrative nature of the Torah. Calling this collection Torah imposes a unity and designates a category. The term "Torah" has been used for the Pentateuch from around the fifth century BCE. The familiar story it relates spans events from the creation of the world to the formation of a people by God and Moses. It concludes just before the divine promises to ancestors are fulfilled, with Israel hearing Moses' "last will and testament" before entering the land.

For reasons no longer discernible, ancient Israel preserved its formal sacred traditions in prose narrative, in sharp contrast to the poetry that dominates the surviving ancient Near Eastern texts. Of course not all the material in the Torah is prose narrative; the Torah incorporates laws, songs, genealogies, and lists. But these are carefully embedded in narrative and receive their meaning from the narrative context. Why narrative? Was it a polemic against the epic Mesopotamian and Canaanite literature? Was it because narrative constitutes a specific form of communication best suited for forming and informing the kind of persons and community the Torah seeks to create or perpetuate? Literary critics conclude that the answer to both questions is yes.

Prose narratives or stories have distinct features that set them apart from other types of literature such as poems, proverbs, or philosophical treatises, all of which are equally familiar modes for transmitting traditions, sacred or otherwise. To use stories is to organize meaningful reality in a certain way: narratives endow structure, characters (i.e., particular persons), and time with significance. They also make certain modes of knowing possible, while bracketing other modes.

The choice of narrative is anything but irrelevant or haphazard. Yet for roughly two centuries, biblical narrative has been eclipsed in scholarly circles, although not outside such circles, by historical considerations. The emergence of literary approaches to the Bible thus signals a major shift. In what follows I review some newer methods, theories, and practices of literary approaches to the Torah that have mushroomed. To illustrate how they assist in interpretation, I show the variety of readings of Genesis 1 -3 that result when the different literary lenses focus the analysis.

Torah as Narrative

Although the Torah is undeniably a composite of sources, reflecting different periods and concerns, it is also a coherent composition in which these sources were combined expressly to convey meanings. Literary critics therefore begin with the text in its final form as a unity whose meanings can be discerned by attention to its literary features. Put simply, literary criticism analyzes what is said by looking at how it is said.

Biblical narrative, like all narrative, depends on certain necessary conventions. A story is told from at least one point of view by an implicit narrator (to be differentiated from an actual narrator or author), often to an implicit reader (again, to be differentiated from a real reader). Characters and plot develop through time in narrative. The specific arrangement of these components conveys the particular intention(s) of the text, and therefore must be examined skillfully.

There are, in addition, techniques and emphases distinct to biblical narrative. For example, the biblical narrator is typically anonymous. Later Jewish and Christian traditions assigned authorship to Moses whereas historical critics have suggested Ezra the scribe as possible author. The Torah does not make either claim. The identity of the reporter is not disclosed in the text. The narrator is also omniscient, reporting events that exceed ordinary human knowledge, such as the thoughts of God. Furthermore, this narrator often withholds explicit value judgments and leaves readers to reconstruct evaluations. While some messages are boldly proclaimed ("You shall have no other gods.…) others are subtle. Is Abraham lauded or criticized for pretending that Sarah is his wife (Genesis 12 and 20)? To uncover the possible answers encoded in the tale one must give close attention to the clues in the text, clues like shifts between first person reports by Abraham and those of the anonymous narrator. One must cultivate awareness of conventions such as type scenes and composite artistry that serve to communicate intention.

Repetition plays an inordinately important role in biblical narrative. Robert Alter observes that the repetition of keywords, motifs, themes, or type scenes is the most misunderstood aspect of biblical narrative. Far from being a mere relic from the past, repetition of words and events creates a network of meanings that demands acute attention. The leading keyword, often in several permutations, guides the attentive reader through the maze of complex ideas and narrative tensions.

The Joseph story illustrates how overlooking keywords lead scholars astray. Alter shows that repetition integrates the otherwise puzzling story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38. He shows how this story's keywords, themes, and motifs intimately link with the rest of the Joseph narrative and with the larger purposes of Genesis as a whole.

The leading word nkr, "recognize," plays a pivotal role. The word first appears when the brothers use clothing to deceive by presenting Joseph's bloodied tunic to Jacob:" … Recognize this please. Is this your son's tunic?" (Gen 37:32). Recognizing, Jacob reaches the wrong conclusions: "He recognized it and said… (Gen 37:33).

In the very next chapter clothing will deceive once again. Tamar uses clothing to disguise herself in order to get her father-in-law Judah to impregnate her. She uses clothing also as clues to compel recognition: "Recognize please to whom these belong …" she says, sending him items he had left in her possession when he lay with her. "And Judah recognized and said 'She is more right than I am!"' (Gen 38:25-26). The climax of this story comes when the brothers appear before Joseph. The text is buzzing with repetition: "And Joseph saw his brothers and recognized them and made himself unrecognizable [meaning also "a stranger"] to them" (Gen 42:7) and again, to emphasize the centrality of the issue, "And Joseph recognized his brothers and they did not recognize him" (Gen 42:10).

The delicate and vital task of "recognizing" not only shapes the story of Joseph, but also that of Judah and Tamar. It also constitutes a moral imperative to readers: the importance of cultivating knowledge. Biblical art is not simply about aesthetics; and literary sensibilities are not simply a luxury. On the contrary, the Bible displays "a complete interfusion of literary art with theological, moral, or historiographical vision, the fullest perception of the latter dependent of the fullest grasp of the former" (Alter, 19).

The relationship between the two creation stories in Genesis 1-3 illustrates the different approaches of the historical and the literary critic. The first creation story (Gen 1:1-2:4a) depicts symmetries and harmony: "God splits off the realm of the earth from the realm of the heaven.… Darkness and light, night and day, evening and morning, water and sky, … each moment of creation is conceived as a balancing of opposites… (Alter, 142-3). The second (Gen 2:4b-3:24) is more interested "in the complicated and difficult facts of human life in civilization" (145). But the accounts are not merely different; they also appear contradictory, most notably in their account of the creation of humanity. The first story states simply: "Male and female he created them" (Gen 1:27). The second story "on the other hand, imagines woman as a kind of divine after-thought, made to fill a need of man, and made, besides, out of one of man's spare parts" (141).

Source critics resolve the tension by designating different sources. They identify the first account as a Priestly source (P) and 2:4b-3:24 as the Yahwist (J). For the literary critic this explanation is insufficient. It fails to address the important question about the meaning of the final form. Why did someone choose to leave these contradictory accounts side by side without modifying them? What does this juxtaposition accomplish? A literary response explores what the text expresses through this arrangement of sources. One such conclusion is that the text creates a bifocal vision. It allows one to see a cosmic scale of events alongside a more human scale. Such a bifocal vision also coerces readers away from a single, monolithic perspective into a plurality and establishes a degree of indeterminacy. Like a postcubist painting that superimposes two perspectives in a single frame, it keeps in tension two realities that cannot be expressed linearly: there are paradoxical dimensions of man and woman. Complexity abounds with regard to God as both magisterially remote (Genesis 1) and intimately engaged with creation (Genesis 2). The story incorporates diverse perspectives by a montage. Monotheism is always caught in the need to make sense of the intersection of two incompatibles—the relative and the absolute, "human imperfection and divine perfection, the brawling chaos of historical experience and God's promise to fulfill a design in history" (154). The contradiction, therefore, is not accidental but an example of composite artistry expressing the paradoxical nature of the human experience within a divinely ordered universe.

Literary approaches to the Bible display a variety of positions concerning the role of history in interpreting biblical narrative. Some altogether dislodge narrative from historical context. Others, like Alter, and even more forcefully Meir Sternberg, underscore the need for historical sensibilities in interpretation. Sternberg, in fact, defends the historiographic character of biblical narrative. He reminds readers that "history-writing is not a record of fact—what 'really' happened—but a discourse that claims to be a record of fact" (Sternberg, 25). The Bible represents a new mode of historiography, emerging to convey certain distinctive messages that could not be conveyed by other available forms.

The role of author and the location of meaning also constitute a bone of contention in literary analysis of the Bible. While many biblical scholars avoid invoking an author, Alter and Stemnberg refer to an author whose intentions are embedded in the carefully crafted narrative. The competent reader must discover these intentions. Stemnberg also claims that in the Bible "foolproof composition" leads the "competent reader" on a journey from "truth to the whole truth," a view that provoked heated debates in which every one of these quoted expressions has been vociferously challenged.

By "foolproof composition" (unfortunately an inflammatory term), Stemnberg asserts something more modest than at first appears. He means that biblical narrative is so constructed as to lead readers to definitively prescribed conclusions. Competent readers who respond to the clues—to what is in the text and what is deliberately omitted—will typically reach a consensus about meanings. The better the reader, the fuller the "truth" discovered.

Steinberg does not deny indeterminacy and ambiguity. On the contrary, they are in the text and they are plentiful. They are not subjective. The author put them there. For example, in the story of Joseph we cannot easily fathom Joseph's motivation in tormenting his brothers. Such inability is not accidental. It is deliberately controlled by the narrative, which is replete with explicit emotions, but leaves out the most important one. All of this serves specific ends. The biblical author has definite notions of truth and seeks to lead readers to them, sometimes explicitly and oftentimes by compelling one to tease out truths. Truth can be nuanced, ambiguous, or conflicted. What is the truth about Joseph's motives? Is he punishing, testing, teaching, or fulfilling dreams? The text deliberately keeps us in suspense because all four are at work (Sternberg, 285-308). Indeterminacy here is the product of foolproof composition. The untrained reader might only grasp a partial truth, such as the fact that Joseph teaches his brothers about true repentance by giving them a chance to relive scenes from their past and undo their original criminal behavior. The more sophisticated might discover two or more, such as the correspondence between the suffering that Joseph inflicts on his brothers and those they had inflicted on him. All of these readings are on a continuum. They are facets of the "whole truth" of this particular story. Stemnberg adamantly rejects the notion that the Bible is elitist literature that gives one set of messages to the initiated "insiders," and a substantially different one to the "outsiders."

For Steinberg, Genesis 1-3, among other things, expresses with knowledge this unique concern of biblical narrative. Other ancient Near Eastern traditions dangle immortality before humanity as the lure for a quest. Gilgamesh journeys to find the elixir that will keep him from dying. In the Bible, however, knowledge takes this role. Trees and other features of the garden of Eden story recur in other mythologies, but the tree of knowledge is unique to the Bible. Medium and message coincide. Knowledge is not merely one of the subjects of biblical narratives. Nor is it merely an important quest that fundamentally defines humanity (hence the tree of knowledge). Knowledge also constitutes the very reason for the specific narrative form.

The Torah casts reality as narrative and presents knowledge as a process that unfolds in time (rather than a set of rules or wisdom sayings).

Many contributions of literary analyses such as Alter's and Stemnberg's have antecedents in scholarly circles going back to the turn of the century, and even in rabbinic traditions when one casts a wider net. Gunkel, Buber, Muilenburg, and this century's great commentaries on the Torah incorporate many of such readings and anticipate much of this work. Profound, new literary insights often echo Cassuto and Jacob conimentaries on Genesis and Exodus; von Rad and Westermann on Genesis; Childs and Greenberg on Exodus; and Plaut on the Torah as a whole. Three important elements, however, differentiate the current literary approaches to biblical narrative. First, attention is given to theoretical underpinnings. Second, a unique synthesis reshapes earlier interpretive insights and practices into more self-conscious strategies of reading and speaking about biblical narrative (see also Bar Efrat, Fokkelman, and Robertson). Third, this widespread systematic literary analysis of biblical narrative in a modern idiom consolidates the inquiry and makes possible a new and urgent level of discussion.

Literary approaches also serve to reconnect in new ways the scholarly concerns with the wider culture. It helps nonspecialists reclaim the Bible as a communal, comprehensible text. Because the interpretation's starting point is the text's final form the novice can begin interpreting and go much further.

The emergence of feminist criticism of the Hebrew Bible offers an important example of the merging of literary issues and wider cultural concerns. Contemporary feminist criticism was launched in biblical studies as an effort to "depatriarchalize" biblical narrative. In her pioneering work, Trible claimed that important biblical texts have been distorted by patriarchal misreadings and need to be reclaimed for their egalitarian, liberating vision of womanhood and God.

Trible's approach is literary, which she initially defined as rhetorical criticism. She offers "close readings" of texts, focusing on surface meanings. Genesis 1-3 plays the crucial role in Trible's depatriarchalizing project. As a literary critic, Trible uses rhetorical analysis of narrative from a feminist perspective, paying attention to the structure of the story, characterization, word play, translation issues, and, above all, the relation between the sexes that the text inscribes.

She begins by drawing attention to the more complex meaning of the key term 'ādām, misleadingly translated as man.

Ambiguity characterizes the meaning of 'ādām in Genesis 2-3. On the one hand, man is the first creature formed (2:7).… On the other hand, 'ādām is a generic term for humankind. In commanding 'ādām not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the Deity is speaking to both the man and the woman (2:16-17). Until differentiation of female and male (2:21-23), 'ādām is basically androgynous: one creature incorporating two sexes. (35)

Man and woman as gendered creatures come into being only after surgery (Gen 2:21-24). As Trible notes, only now do the distinctive words man … and woman … appear. "Before this episode the Yahwist has used only the generic term'ādām. No exclusively male reference has appeared.… Male does not precede woman as female but happens concurrently with her" (37).

The so-called Fall, according to Trible, offers an astonishing portrait of a thoughtful woman and a thoughtless man. The woman takes up the theological problem posed by the serpent's question. She weighs the evidence and acts on the basis of three compelling reasons: the forbidden fruit is nutritious, attractive, and a source of wisdom. "If the woman be intelligent, sensitive and ingenious, the man is passive, brutish and inept. These character portrayals are truly extraordinary in a culture dominated by men. I stress their contrast not to promote female chauvinism but to undercut patriarchal interpretations alien to the text" (40).

Feminist biblical criticism and Trible herself have come a long way from this initial, optimistic position to a more complicated range of assessments. Like other critical approaches to the Bible, feminist criticism ramified into multiple modes of analysis, theories, methods, and practices. Feminist studies typically combine with other critical perspectives (e.g., feminist-literary criticism to be distinguished, say, from feminist-historical criticism).

What unifies feminist approaches is the common concern with the relationship between gender and power. Feminists debate, however, whether feminism can merely investigate gender issues descriptively or must, prescriptively, advocate certain positions—either deliberately or inevitably—namely gender equality or the liberation of women.

The relation of biblical narrative to history often looms large in many feminists' analyses. Feminists concentrate on five related tasks: (1) retrieving images and voices of women in the Bible; (2) analyzing these representations of women and absence of women; (3) reconstructing lives of women; (4) analyzing the Hebrew Bible as a patriarchal construct; and (5) developing responses to these findings.

The role of reader takes a different form in feminist circles from the one emphasized by Alter's and Sternberg's approach. Since reading as a woman differs from reading as a man (men find themselves included, women excluded), feminist critics begin with a "hermeneutic of suspicion." They do not merely analyze underlying ideologies and tensions, but question them as well. They also pay attention to what is not there, especially the female presence. Feminist critics who position themselves within the biblical traditions of Judaism and Christianity have devised several different strategies for coping with androcentric, patriarchal, or sexist texts sanctioned by their communities as authoritative.

Some look for perspectives within the Bible to counteract those inimical to women. Yes, admittedly women are displaced in the text. Moses prepares the people to encounter God at Sinai by addressing only men, saying "Do not go near a woman" (Exodus 19). But this negative address can be contrasted and balanced by stories where women are prominent in Israel's other formative event, the Exodus itself. Women of different classes and ethnicity (the midwives Shiphra and Puah, Moses' mother and sister, and the daughter of Pharaoh) initiate nonviolent civil disobedience that saves baby boys, including Moses (Exodus 2) and makes the Exodus possible. They also have the final word: "And Miriam the prophetess, Aaron's sister, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her, dancing with timbrels. And Miriam responded to them: 'Sing to YHWH.…"' (Exod 15:20-21).

While some feminist critics reread texts in ways that revalorize women by claiming that this reading represents the narrative's point of view, others take issue with the narrative's perspective by reading against the grain. Some critics acknowledge the patriarchy in the text but separate the text's meanings from the historically contingent (as a product of its own time and place) and seek enduring messages in other portions of the Bible. Critics often relocate authority, shifting it from the early community responsible for the Bible (and subject to the conventions of its time) to the contemporary community of interpreters.

The question of where meanings reside is central to a number of new literary theories, but it takes on special urgency in feminist approaches. Feminists wrestle with the contradictions between biblical representations of women and archaeological information that reflects more participatory roles for women in culture (religious or secular). They often engage not only in the recovery of women, text, and tradition but also in an analysis of ancient and modern. patriarchy with an eye towards change.

As a result, narratives in the Torah receive varied interpretation in feminist circles. Take again the story of Judah and Tamar (Genesis 38) where Tamar deliberately breaks a cultural taboo in order to coerce Judah to do his duty. Is this a story of a woman subverting patriarchal conventions or of transgression in the service of patriarchy? What is the force of Judah's conclusions about Tamar's breach of the tradition, "She is more right than I am!" (Gen 38:26)? Is Tamar's labor meant to encourage women to risk everything in order to produce male children or a mandate for women to refuse to be written out of history and take whatever measures are necessary to ensure their place? What about Miriam? Should feminists focus on her glorious role in the Exodus or in the stories that follow? What could be done with the narrative that shows how, when she stands up for equal public power, and not for maternal roles (Numbers 12), both God and the text silence her? How to process the fact that she is buried unceremoniously a few chapters later (Num 20:1), and Moses only recalls the sister who had saved his life by setting her as a warning (Deut 24:9)?

Feminist readings of biblical narratives and those of the Torah in particular, remain varied and provocative. No consensus is in view. Genesis 1-3 plays a prominent role in debates about biblical narrative and feminist perspectives.

Alter, for example, notes the linguistic correspondence between the two Hebrew words: "remembered" … and "male". …¹ The male is the one who remembers, whose memory is enshrined in the book. In patriarchy, "the only memory is the male memory, because the only members are male members" (Alter, 45). But the memory is not monolithic and within it are seeds that can flower into more inclusive models of self and others. Alter holds the two stories of the creation together, refusing to let either dominate. The first story (P source) depicts gendered humanity created as two varieties of a single species. "The creation precedes not by polarization but by differentiation within wholeness." Male and female, the two varieties of 'adam, "embody diversity within similarity" (46). The second story (J source) is the birth of patriarchy, a process of opposition and partialization. "Adam in this story is a male individual and bears a curious resemblance to the motherless asocial resident of the state of nature posited by liberal political theory" (46). Woman has no independent being. Her very definition (woman …) is derivative from man … in Gen 2:23. Together they are the human and his woman (Gen 2:25). Genesis 2 is best understood as the creation of patriarchy, depicting "the patriarchs' inner experience—loneliness, and a sense of mutilation—and its attempt to recover the banished other through fusion.… An Eden founded upon a fantasy of obliterating the other is bound to be unstable" (46).

Pardes, however, refuses to disconnect Genesis 3 from the larger story of Genesis 1-11. To end with chapter 3 is to highlight the so-called Fall and distort the story. But Eve does not fade from view with her naming or with the expulsion. On the contrary, Pardes argues, Eve makes an impressive comeback: in the unfolding story she is not subjugated by either the man or by the narrative. She speaks more than the man, before and after the expulsion from the garden. In fact, only the woman speaks after that point (Gen 4:1 and 4:25). The names she chooses for her children claim a close connection with God. She defines motherhood as a partnership with God and boasts of her generative power in naming her son (Gen 4:1). "Through her naming of Cain, Eve rewrites Genesis 2 as a subversive comment on Adam's displacement of the generative power of the female body" (Pardes, 48). In her final appearance Eve, not the man who has been and will remain silent, comments on the tragic murder of Abel: "… she bore a son, and called his name Seth …, for 'God had appointed … me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew"' (4:25).

Bal recasts the questions. Reading Genesis 1-3, Bal accomplishes several different things, one of which will occupy us here. Bal offers a complementary perspective to Trible's (even if at times she contests Trible's views), seconding Trible's conclusions that the text depicts woman positively. She does not claim that this reading is the correct one but only one among several possible options. Bal wants to understand why sexist readings have dominated cultures from antiquity to the present when the positive readings of renditions of women in the text are as defensible.

She approaches the Bible as neither a feminist resource nor a sexist manifesto but as an influential text with cultural repercussions. In Lethal Love she demonstrates the relative arbitrariness of all readings, including sexist readings, by examining their emergence in biblical narrative. Her purpose is not to cancel "dominant readings" but to expose their relative position. She also examines the unacknowledged influence of popular culture upon scholarship.

Narrative as Torah

With the work of Bal we are already well within a second major development in recent biblical studies, one that can be organized loosely under the heading "Narrative as Torah." Since biblical narrative is Torah, that is a teaching, what does it teach by virtue of being narrative and how does it teach? Torah aims to persuade. Narrative as Torah seeks to impart teachings powerful enough to affect an entire people. What does that entail? Here the overarching question, "Where does meaning reside?" is refocused to examine some broader issues about language and culture as reflected and reproduced in biblical narrative. The overlap among many of these angles of visions, and their intimate connections to the approaches mentioned above, is inevitable and often salutary.

Bal herself deliberately uses several different sets of theories and practices in analysis of biblical narrative. With many postmodern critics she claims that the text is not an object to be interpreted but a subject who speaks to us. Interpretation is equally dependent on a reader's response. Her work, deliberately, stands at the intersection of several major tributaries of current biblical research on narrative. The critical task, not just the feminist task, is to account for the permanent interaction between social and individual processes.

Because all interpretations and critical analyses come from within several interdependent systems, unmasking presuppositions is necessary. The goal is neither to debunk theories or interpretations nor to plead for some Archimedean or purist stance. It is a necessary exercise for realizing the inevitable relativity of all interpretation, and therefore the relative status of any interpretive claims to authority.

Undergirding the critical perspectives that Bal and other postmodern critics represent is the recognition that biblical narrative presupposes a writer, a reader, a text, and a world. In recent decades scholars have reflected in new ways on how these elements intersect in the production of meaning(s). Although these approaches baffle the uninitiated with their technical, inbred vocabulary, they constitute a significant development in biblical studies in the ways they problematize the questions of meaning. They jar interpreters out of the naive assumption that what we mean by meaning is self-evident.

Structuralism locates meanings of narrative not in the vocabulary, plot, or characters of the text, but in its deep structures. Structuralists bracket individual features in favor of the linguistic, symbolic, or cultural codes embodied in the narrative through universal principles of communication. Genesis 1-3, for example, is replete with bipolar oppositions that must be held together, heaven/earth, night/day, man/woman, good/evil, death/life, and mortality/immortality. Structuralists chart the movements between these oppositions and analyze the transformations that follow.

Deconstruction (among other things) is the skeptic's challenge to structuralism and to any claims that meanings are stable entities. Meanings are not contained in any of the identifiable or identified elements in the text, but discerned in the perpetual processes of differentiation from what they are and what they are not. Therefore meanings are fluid and contextual, indeterminate in nature. It is an error to construe deconstruction as a nihilist denial of meaning. What it rejects is privileged claims on behalf of some essential meanings that persist through time in language or words. According to deconstruction, the futile quest for authoritative, original meaning or permanent meaning is a misapprehension of what meaning is and how it operates.

From a deconstructionist perspective, Genesis 1-3 exemplifies the ways meaning and identity emerge through a process of differentiation. The sea and the earth, for example, are not entities as much as differentiations. This is even clearer in the development of humans: first we find differentiation from earth to create the first human, 'ādām. Then follows yet another differentiation in which first woman … and then man … are further distinguished, culminating in the case of woman with the name. The meaning of man or woman in these chapters is contextual and relative. They derive their identity through their differences and separation.

Speech-acts theory asks not what narrative means but what it does. Words create events. They do not merely lie inert on a flat surface; they shape history (not merely reflect history) and must be understood within the historical context they have modified. The Torah in the sense of the teachings embodied in the Pentateuch is not merely descriptive but also prescriptive. It intends consequence: "So that your children will learn …" (Deut 31:13). For speech-acts theory, Genesis 1 is the paradigm example of the creative power of speech. However, this approach also seeks to understand the more ordinary ways in which the mutuality between language and world takes place in biblical narrative and through biblical narrative.

Historical considerations of a different sort emerge in a variety of investigative models that examine ideological aspects of biblical narrative. Although Stemnberg identifies the ideological nature of the Hebrew Bible, he retains a narrow definition of the ideology. The social-philosophical work by Foucault, Jameson, and Eagleton illuminate texts as cultural products, serving a particular class, and exerting real socio-economic power on the world rather than a private intellectual experience of a reader. Materialist and new historicist investigations approaches to the Bible are among those that develop this line of investigation. Narratives are not only religiously "loaded" but economically charged. Decoding these dynamics is part of responsible interpretation. The reader may resist rather than assent to the forces embedded in the text. In biblical studies Gottwald stands out as pioneer in this line of interpretation.

Genesis 2-3, for example, takes on different meanings when we contemplate the prominence of food in this text and examine the repercussions. The root meaning "eat" occurs fourteen times in nineteen verses (Gen 3:1, 2, 3, 5, 6 [3 times], 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19)! Food is linked with knowledge and domination. Genesis 2-3 focuses on means of production, splits them along gender lines, and subordinates one (woman and her procreation of children) to the other (man and his production of food). One asks: who benefits from these constructions of reality? What class produced these narratives? Who was to read them and why? How does this story function in society? What social and economic powers does it serve? What positions can a responsible reader take vis-à-vis such a text, whether as a member of biblical religions or not? Like feminist analysis of gender issues, these analyses explore issues of class, race, and other overlooked ideologies in the text. The overarching assumption is that there are no texts or readers without ideologies. The question is always what they are, not whether they exist.

These perspectives, and others related to them, seek to discern or create commonly accessible responses to questions such as: Are meanings located in texts? If so how? What does it mean to interpret? Is meaning something stable, embodied in the words themselves or in the network of their specific or universal relations? Are the important relations on the surface or below it? And if it is in both, is there contiguity or tension between the two? What social forces and powers influence the creation and use of this text? How can we understand the world(s) of the text? How can it help us understand our world(s)? Given the significance that the Torah has been granted in religious and other cultural arenas, discussions about the very nature of meaning and its location remain consequential even when inconclusive.

Narrative theology, like speech-acts theory, attends to the impact of speech on the "real world" beyond the text. It focuses on the specific theological consequence of stories and on the ways this prescriptive literature functions. Like Alter's literary approach, narrative theology takes narrativity as a significant starting point but asks different questions. How are stories true? What does it mean really "to hear" a biblical story? What distinctive relations are there between stories and persons in communities? Narrative theology does not ask whether Genesis 1-3 is true as an event that happened but what does it mean to be true to the story. This account is a living tradition that shapes communities and the individuals within them. Selves and communities are consolidated by stories. Biblical stories contributed to the means and mode of this consolidation in particular ways. Biblical stories, especially the Torah, seek to compel moral and practical assent not merely convey information.

Canonical approaches attend to the meanings of the Hebrew Bible as Scripture, i.e., as accepted (and in the case of the Torah also self-proclaimed), authoritative, and sacred teachings. Imputed sanctity is not just another ingredient superficially added after everything else has been done. It is a transformative category for the purpose of interpretation and must be investigated as such. Even before Alter's literary approach, canonical criticism insisted on examining the text in its final form. Before narrative theology, it also argued for the unique role of the biblical text in communities. Childs's canonical approach is especially decisive for the Torah. In contrast to the two approaches just mentioned, it puts historical criticism at the service of interpreting the final form of the text in the context of communities for whom the text is authoritative. Childs's layered exploration in his Exodus commentary exemplifies the depth and breadth of such possibilities. It also differs from other approaches listed above in originating uniquely in biblical studies.²

Torah as Torah

In theory and practice, the Torah has been the centerpiece of Jewish life for over two millennia and the subject of its most intensive analytic explorations. For Jews who lived mostly in exile, as a minority among host nations, the text became homeland. It was the most deeply and persistently probed reality. Because Hebrew remained the language of study and prayer, not merely the language of the subject matter (Torah), rabbinic interpretations accrued a vast treasury of insights especially attentive to linguistic nuances. The Jewish exegetical tradition came to influence scholarly readings once the similarities between rabbinic interpretive practices and certain contemporary approaches were noted. Buber helped bridge the rabbinic approaches to the Bible and the scholarly world in earlier decades. Indirectly Alter serves a similar role. A new synthesis is developing through the work of scholars grounded in contemporary biblical scholarship and also deeply immersed in Jewish exegetical practices.

Intertextuality, philology, polyvalent meanings, indeterminacy, and word play are some rabbinic hallmarks that overlap with recent approaches to biblical narrative. The rabbis revelled in multiplicity of meanings and the playfulness of the text long before these were discovered by modern critics. They said the Torah has seventy faces. And the revelation at Sinai had 600,000 different meanings, as many as the persons who heard it. In the Medieval period the term Pardes—a loan word and cognate of the English paradise—came to encapsulate exegesis. The four letters that form the Hebrew word, P, R, D, and S respectively designated levels or meanings: plain (peshat), allusive (remez), deep (derash), and secret (sod). Every text must be plumbed for these levels. An appropriate, multilevel reading is a paradise. It is not that the Torah guides you to paradise; it is paradise. You enter and inhabit it through the gates of exegesis.

Magonet's reading of Genesis 2-3 exemplifies such a synthesis.³ The title of his essay, "Leaving the Garden: Did They Fall or Were They Pushed?" already hints at the conclusion and plants a measure of indeterminacy. It also reflects the sense of play that characterizes this most serious, holy task of rabbinic exegesis.

Magonet notes the different narrative structures implicit in Jewish and Christian readings. In the Hebrew Bible, the unit goes uninterrupted from Gen 2:4 to 3:21. In the Hebrew version, then, the story pauses at "And YHWH made skin clothings for Adam and his woman and dressed them." The encounter in the garden thus ends with divine compassion and practical provisions. "It is only the Christian chapter divisions, presumably because of the later importance attached to the story of the Fall, that make the artificial division at the beginning of chapter 3, thus isolating the episode of the snake" (113).

Magonet explores the pun on "naked" … in Gen 2:25 and "cunning" … in Gen 3:1. What does "naked" mean? He concludes that sexual connotations are at most secondary because the philological study of the verb in other contexts shows that the term means "helpless" or "vulnerable." Elsewhere it describes captives dragged to war (Isa 20:2-4), a fugitive soldier (Amos 2:16), or a helpless baby (Eccl 5:14). As for sin, it only enters the picture with the story of Cain (115-18). The story of the garden is thus the story of God as an overprotective parent who tries to keep the children from the pain of knowledge but nevertheless gives them the impetus to explore. "So did they fall, or were they pushed? And is the 'Fall' the cataclysm that some theologies see it as—or is it a first, necessary step towards emancipation of humanity?" (115). Magonet concludes with the earlier rabbis that eating of the fruit and the expulsion from the garden "gave the 'children' in Eden the chance to grow up. God cut the strings of the puppets and let them walk erect upon the earth" (121-22).

Like the title of Magonet's book, which gently and humorously points a finger at God, (who else could have pushed them?), so too the conclusion challenges God even as it affirms. In this reading, as in other Jewish arguments with God, loving and wrestling flow together.

Future Directions

With newer approaches to Torah as narrative firmly established alongside historical ones, the most urgent task for the decades ahead is implementing, rigorously, the basic insights of such approaches. A vast number of excellent literary analyses of narratives in the Torah have been published, but the book of the Torah as a unified story remains largely unexamined. Scholars looking at trees have overlooked the forest. Since the parts and the whole are invariably interdependent, atomistic analyses lose anchorage as long as the Torah has not been studied as an integrated narrative. One can only point to Clines's The Theme of the Pentateuch, which uses literary analysis to understand the ways the promises to ancestors function in the multiple levels throughout the entire Torah and to Mann's The Book of the Torah, which uses Alter's literary approach to read the Torah as an integrated story. Plaut's The Torah, although it does not do so in a systematic fashion, nevertheless attempts to connect the parts with the whole. One still looks for studies that investigate in light of the new questions just how the five books of the Torah interact as "chapters" of the Torah. The literary significance of weaving poetry and laws into narrative still requires careful attention. Point of view studies are yet to appear. Polzin's pioneering analysis on the tension between the voice of Moses and those of the narrators in Deuteronomy⁴ needs to extend to the Torah as a whole in order to understand how Moses is portrayed and what the undercurrents communicate. The development of characters such as God, Moses, Israel, or less prominent ones, in relation to plot, still awaits close scrutiny.

The dialogue between literary and historical issues needs to be revived in light of changing presuppositions and questions. Alter rightly claims that the Bible reflects "a complete interfusion of literary art with theological, moral, or historiographical vision, the fullest perception of the latter dependent of the fullest grasp of the former" (Alter, 19). It remains a future task to translate this assertion into studies of the Torah. At this stage literary critics largely pay lip service to traditional or postmodern historical questions and do not engage their findings. They wrestle more directly with theological issues, but shy away from exploring the moral implications of Torah narratives. Here contributions from other fields can assist the biblical scholar. Nussbaum's study of literature and the moral point of view⁵ opens new perspectives for understanding how great literature shapes readers' morality by complicating their sympathies. Her insights shed light on the sympathetic treatment of Esau and other marginalized figures, and presses one to reformulate notions of morality. Pursuing these new directions demands greater collaboration among approaches and among critics. Like Israel at the end of the Torah, biblical scholars at the end of the millennium have heard the promises, have witnessed their potential, and have accepted obligations. Fulfillment belongs to the future.

Notes

¹ "A Question of Boundaries: Toward a Jewish Feminist Theology of Self and Others," in Tikkun 3/6 (May/June) 1991 43-46 and 87.

² See B. S. Childs, The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary, OTL (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974), and Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Westminster, 1979).

³ Jonathan Magonet, A Rabbi's Bible (London: SCM, 1991) esp. 111-22.

⁴ Robert Polzin, Moses and the Deuteronomist: A Literary Study of the Deuteronomic History (New York: Seabury, 1990) esp. 1-72.

⁵ See Martha C. Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) esp. 230-44 and 335-64.

Selected Bibliography

Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books, 1981.

Bal, Mieke. Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Bar-Efrat, Shimon. Narrative Art in the Bible. JSOTSup. 70. Sheffield: Almond, 1989 (orig. in Hebrew, 1979).

Buber, Martin. Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1988 (origin. 1946).

Clines, David J. A. The Theme of the Pentateuch. JSOTSup. 10. Sheffield: JSOT, 1978.

Fokkelman, Jan P. Literary Art in Genesis: Specimens of Stylistic and Structural Analysis. JSOT. Sheffield: JSOT, 1991. (origin. 1975).

Leibowitz, Nehamah. Studies in Genesis, 4th rev. ed. Translated by Aryeh Newman. Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, Department of Torah Education and Culture in the Diaspora, 1981.

——. Studies in Exodus. Translated by Aryeh Newman. Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, Department of Torah Education and Culture in the Diaspora, 1981.

——. Studies in Leviticus. Translated by Aryeh Newman. Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, Department of Torah Education and Culture in the Diaspora, 1980.

——. Studies in Numbers, rev. ed. Translated by Aryeh Newman. Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, Department of Torah Education and Culture in the Diaspora, 1981.

——. Studies in Deuteronomy. Translated by Aryeh Newman. Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, Department of Torah Education and Culture in the Diaspora, 1981.

Mann, Thomas W. The Book of the Torah: The Narrative Integrity of the Pentateuch. Atlanta: John Knox, 1988.

Pardes, Ilana. Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Plaut, Gunther, Bernard J. Bamberger, William W. Hallo. The Torah: A Commentary. New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981.

Sternberg, Meir. The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Ideological Reading. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Trible, Phyllis. God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. OBT. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978.

Abbreviations

Abbreviations of Commonly used Periodicals, Reference Words, and Serials (with additions to the SBL abbreviation list noted with an asterisk)

AB

Anchor Bible

ABD

Anchor Bible Dictionary^*

ARBL

Anchor Bible Reference Library^*

ANET

J. B. Pritchard (ed.), Ancient Near Eastern Texts

AOAT

Alter Orient and Altes Testament

ATD

Das Alte Testament Deutsch

ATDan

Acta theologica danica

BAR

Biblical Archaeologist Reader

Bib

Biblica

BibRev

Bible Review

BZAW

Beihefte zu ZAW

CBQ

Catholic Biblical Quarterly

CBQMS

Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series

DJD

Discoveries in the Judean Desert

FOTL

The Forms of Old Testament Literature

FRLANT

Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments

HAR

Hebrew Annual Review

HBC

J. L. Mays, et al. (eds.), Harper's Bible Commentary

HKAT

Handkommentar zum Alten Testament

HSM

Harvard Semitic Monographs

HTR

Harvard Theological Review

HUCA

Hebrew Union College Annual

IBC

Inerpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching

IDB

George Buttrick (ed.), Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible

IEJ

Israel Exploration Journal

JAAR

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

JBL

Journal of Biblical Literature

JSOT

Journal for the Study of the Old Tes tament

JSOTSup

Journal for the Study of the Old Tes tament-—Supplement Series

NCB

New Century Bible

ORO

Orbis biblicus et orientalis

OBT

Overtures to Biblical Theology

OTL

Old Testament Library

RB

Revue biblique

SBLDS

SBL Dissertation Series

SBLMS

SBL Monograph Series

SBLSP

SBL Seminar Papers

SBLSS SeL

Semeia Series

SBT

Studies in Biblical Theology

SHANE

Studies in the History of the Ancient Near East^*

SJOT

Scandinavian Journal of Theology^*

SSN

Studia semitica neerlandica

SUNT

Studien zur Umwelt des Neuen Testaments

TUMSR

Trinity University Monograph Series in Religion^*

VT

Vetus Tesamentum

VTSup

Vetus Tesamentum, Supplements

WBC

Word Biblical Commentary

WMANT

Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament

ZA

Zeitschrift für Assyriologie

ZAW

Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft

Abbreviations of Books Cited Often in this Work

Blenkinsopp,

Pentateuch Blenkinsopp, Joseph. The Pentateuch: An Introduction to the First Five books of the Bible, ARBL. New York: Doubleday, 1992.

Childs,

Introduction Childs, Brevard. Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979.

Clines,

Theme Clines, David J. A. The Theme, of the Pentateuch, JSOTSup 10. Sheffield: JSOT, 1978.

Cross,

Canaanite Myth Cross, Frank More. Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973.

Hayes, ed.,

Form Criticism Hayes, John. Old Tes tament Form Criticism, TUMSR 2. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1974.

Knight/Tucker, eds.,

Hebrew Bible Knight, Douglas, and Gene Tucker, ed. The He brew Bible and Its Modern Interpretrs. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985.

Mann,

Torah Mann, Thomas W. The Book of the Torah; The Narrative Integrity of the Pentateuch. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988.

Polzin,

Moses Polzin, Robert. Moses and the Deuteronimist: A Literary Study of the Deuteronomic History, Part I: Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges. New York: Seabury, 1980.

Polzin,

Samuel Polzin, Robert. Samuel and the Deuteronimist: A Literary Study of the Deuteronomic History, Part II: I Samuel. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989.