Causales, circunstancias y consecuencias, en las cuales puede incurrir un

The concept of the historical development of the biblical text is generally

accepted in biblical academic circles. Since it was first posited more than 200 years ago, many of the questions regarding discrepancies in language, terminology, information, and ideas in the Pentateuch have been explained by the documentary hypothesis, which explains that the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, was formed from many

documents that were combined and edited over many years.90 The principle source

documents in the Pentateuch are known as J, E, D, and P. However, in the world of literary analysis of biblical narratives there is some equivocation regarding the use of this information. A search for the principles, or poetics, of biblical narrative has led some scholars to the determination that poetics can explain almost all the literary and

conceptual differences in a text.91 Therefore, they reject the use of diachronic study and adopt a synchronic approach, using only the final canonical biblical text.92 Meir

90 _{One alternative model of the process of the development of the Pentateuch has been proposed by Tzemah}

Yoreh and discussed by others, including Robert Polzin and Bernard Levinson. Known as the

“supplementary hypothesis,” and building on scholarship accumulated through inner-biblical interpretation, its thesis is that the final text came from a series of interpretive additions. Joel Baden‘s recently published in J, E, and the Redaction of the Pentateuch concludes that the different sources remained independent

(including J and E), each representing a segment of society that had different viewpoints, and they were brought together at the time of Ezra.

91 _{Yairah Amit suggests that the biblical literary device, repetition, is a biblical principle and can explain}

repetitions otherwise thought to derive from multiple text sources. Her point, presented in “The Repeated Situation – a Poetic Principle in the Modeling of the Joseph Narrative,”55-66, is discussed in Chapter 3, Repetitions.

92 _{The term “synchronic” comes from linguistics, in which it pertained to a method that was concerned with}

the state of a language at one time, past or present. A synchronic study related to the Bible examines the biblical text as it stands in its final form, as it was canonized. The opposing term, “diachronic,” also comes from linguistics, in which diachronic study of language was concerned with the historical development of a language. Diachronic study of biblical texts takes into account the hypothesis that the canonical version is comprised of various sources that were brought together over time. This hypothesis

Sternberg, for example, argues that repetitions are everywhere purposive and should be analyzed as poetics.93 One can and should, he says, determine the meaning and

coherence of the text through synchronistic examination.94 Sternberg adeptly uses the techniques of modern literary theory in his analyses, but those theories were developed presuming that the texts under scrutiny were written by a single author. Adele Berlin states that “poetic interpretation is a synchronic approach to the text;” knowledge of poetics “prevents the mistaking of certain features of the present text’s discourse for evidence of earlier sources.”95

Biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies have confirmed the value of diachronic analysis of texts. The study by Jeffrey Tigay of the evolution of the Gilgamesh epic in ancient Mesopotamia provides a model for utilizing the documentary hypothesis and

source-critical methods in the Bible.96 Other fine examples include Moshe Greenberg’s

analysis of the plague narrative in Exodus, Bernard Levinson’s analysis of the flood narrative, Baruch Schwartz’s delineation of the priestly account of the revelation at Sinai,

has been developed and refined for two hundred years and is accepted by most academic biblical scholars. Some scholars who accept this hypothesis, including Adele Berlin, Poetics,109-110, tend to lessen its

importance when they focus on the poetics of the text.

93 _{Bernard M. Levinson critiques Sternberg’s methodology in “The Right Chorale: From the Poetics to the}

Hermeneutics of the Hebrew Bible” in Not in Heaven, 134. In Levinson’s article, he demonstrates the

value that diachronic analysis can offer to interpretation of narrative (the Flood story) and to legal texts in the Bible. In her SBL ’07 Abstract, Françoise Mirguet of Harvard University reconsiders Sternberg’s affirmation that the biblical innovation of the omniscient narrator reflects the characterization of God.

94 _{Meir Sternberg,}

The Poetics of Biblical Narrative. Although Sternberg’s perceptive reading of the

biblical text and awareness of literary theory is significant, his methodology ignores some basic historical scholarship.

95 _Berlin,

Poetics, 20-21.

96 _{Jeffrey H. Tigay,“The Evolution of the Pentateuchal Narratives in the Light of the Evolution of the}

Gilgamesh Epic.” In his discussion of the Sumerian texts about Gilgamesh, Tigay writes, “The point to

keep in mind is that they must have had a meaning and function of their own and these were not necessarily identical to those of the Akkadian epic” (32).

and Robert Alter’s delineation of the J and E versions of the Joseph story in Genesis 42.97 In each of these the documentary sources diachronically revealed provide insight into their own values and poetics; the combined texts reveal the values, conventions, and poetics of the editors. I will be using historical-critical scholarship in my analysis of the narratives in this study. Occasionally this will reveal the values of the editor/redactor, as well as that of the component authors, as a narrative is brought to a conclusion.