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Book Review: The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading

THE POETICS OF BIBLICAL NARRATIVE: IDEOLOGICAL LITERATURE AND THE DRAMA OF READING. By Meir Sternberg. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University, 1985. Pp. xiv + 580. $57.50; $15 paper. Sternberg is professor of poetics and comparative literature at TelAviv University and has published extensively on both biblical and modern literature. Well respected as a major contemporary literary critic, he has set himself the task of delineating nothing less than a foundational theory of biblical narrative literature. He chooses the term "poetics" carefully because it requires a systematic study of the biblical narratives primarily as literature. This approach takes the literary art and aesthetic dimensions of the text seriously. But S. goes far beyond a superficial analysis of rhetorical devices and structural elements that so often have passed as "literary criticism" of the Bible. For him, narrative is marked by a functional structure of communication between narrator and audience in which an author chooses strategies to produce the desired effects on the reader. Biblical narrative is treated as a complex, multifunctional discourse built on three principles: ideological, historiographie, and aesthetic. They co-operate but in subtle and often tricky ways. That the Bible as religious writing involves both ideological and historical ends has long been acknowledged, but few have truly accredited a strong aesthetic dimension as a partner in the purposes of narrative. To develop how these three principles interrelate, S. devotes considerable space to analyzing narrative models, especially one which purports to reflect divine inspiration. He investigates the ideology of narratives that claim to be from an omniscient and omnipotent God and what that signified for ancient writers. He also examines viewpoints within texts, the threefold play of perspectives between God and narrator, between narrator and reader, and between God and the characters of the narrative. He does a superb job bringing out the myriad ways in which ambiguity and irony are used, as well as the effect of gaps in texts, suspense, temporal discontinuity, proleptic announcements, and portraits. He then studies the role of repetition as a strategy of persuasion. The book ends with two chapters on the art of persuasion: one on the appeal to conscience, the other on the problem of justifying God to humans. He focuses on the strategies used to move an audience from one stance to another. These are never, however, merely external to the narrative; rather, the narrative itself requires the movement by its aesthetic presentation. S. has written a very important book, both for his comprehensiveness and for the clearly-avowed faith stance from which he understands and interprets the strategies of the biblical narratives. Sometimes he over-