Rosengren on Clines on Rendtorff
On the SBL site, Allan Rosengren has responded to David J. A. Clines’s response to Rolf Rendtorff’s reflections on the Yahwist, about which I blogged a few weeks ago.
Rosengren’s article begins with a discussion on the different between prose and poetry, noting that we don’t like seeing doublets in prose but accept them as part of poetry. He wonders whether we should look for parallelism in prose as well. I think we should, but I think when we do so we are engaged in redaction criticism instead of source criticism. It is the redactor (apologies to John van Seters) later author who has placed parallel stories side by side in prose, whereas it is one author who does it in the process of composition in poetry.
Rosengren points out that a desire for consistency is the reason we have the Documentary Hypothesis. I spent this morning pointing out the inconsistencies in the Pentateuch to students in my intro class, and I did so to show them the reason that the Documentary Hypothesis was created. Rosengren asks what the use of the Documentary Hypothesis is and answers his own question by noting that it creates consistency. Or better yet, as he himself says, it creates consistencies.
He notes, however, that in doing so we often times overlook the various voices in the text. Instead of focusing on the multitude of outlooks that the Old Testament presents, we feel more comfortable with looking at four different sources that are each internally consistant. He suggests that we should speak of different voices in the text instead of sources, since sources implies an authorial mode. I would agree with him, but when doing source criticism I prefer to speak of layers instead of voices.
I think Rosengren’s suggestion of listening to different voices in the text is important, but it confuses two different tasks. The job of source criticism is to trace the development of the text. To speak of voices in the text is to treat the text synchronically, while source criticism is by nature a diachronic task. When we are doing redaction criticism, that is the time to pay attention to competing voices in the text, and as we move towards the theological task it is even more important.
Paying attention to the multitude of voices in the text is not the new approach that Rosengren thinks it is, however. We have been doing this for a couple of decades now. One need only look at Walter Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament with its subtitle Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy to see how this approach has become part of Old Testament studies.
On September 13th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
Kevin,
Even by my low standards, this is a little off the wall. I agree that there is some parallelism in Hebrew prose. What I am about to suggest does not apply (at least I think it doesn’t) to the long parallel accounts that occur side by side but the short ones consisting of a few words or a single sentence. There is a scribal tradition, seen most clearly in the glosses in the Amarna letters from Canaan of “repeating a thought” sometimes in the same language as the letter (more or less peripheral Akkadian) or in the local language (Canaanite). One would guess they did this to increase clarity or to emphasize the importance of the point being made. These glosses are actually marked off by a special gloss mark. The same thing happens occasionally in the Akkadian texts from Ugarit and elsewhere where they are most commonly used to define a logogram that the scribe thinks his reader may not understand. What I’m wondering is if some portion of the parallelism in Hebrew prose can be attributed to scribal practices that seem awkward to us but were perfectly fine, even expected, at certain places in a text in antiquity. I’m not suggesting anything more (or less) than an ongoing scribal tradition of using glosses on occasion. Perhaps it is nothing more than a “good trick,” meaning something that comes up with some regularity but each instance is totally independent of the other. The Hebrew scribes certainly didn’t know anything about how Late Bronze Age scribes went about their business. This is likely not an original thought and I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable of the literature to know. For instance, van Seders’ book is on my ever growing “to do” list. If this idea has any merit, the “glossing process” may not be evidence of redaction nor of differing sources.
On September 14th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
I think there are sometimes that we can talk about parallelism in prose. After all, as Kugel pointed out, prose and poetry are two ends of the spectrum in Hebrew. There is a great deal in the middle and a texts place on the spectrum is defined by how much parallelism it exibits.
However, I don’t think that when we find duplicate texts in the Pentateuch, we are looking at the same phenomenon that you are describing. For one thing, you are talking about letters, which are a different genre than narrative. They employ different practices. And I can understand a scribe clarifying a sign that their readers might misunderstand, but that is not what is happening in Hebrew narratives either.
As for the repitition that is found in other ANE texts, there we usually get an exact repitition of events which seems to be stylistic. And, the repititions occur within stories. It is an internal thing.
This is not what we find, for example, in the wife-sister stories in Genesis 12, 20, and 26. Here, we have the story told three different times, but there are difference. The purpose is not stylistic, and there are other reasons to see these stories as coming from different hands. It seems to be a process of midrash where the story is reinterpreted through retelling. That is why the details are different.
The question I was discussing above had more to do with what we do when reading these texts together in a canonical text. Why did the redactor place these stories side by side. Obviously, they knew that these were three versions of the same story but chose to put them in. The question is, why was this done. The answer, it seems to me, has theological implications.
It is of course the case that Israelite scribal practices might be different than ours. But we cannot simply assign everything to this category. If we have evidence for different scribal practices, we should take that into account. But the redactional production of texts is also different from how we do things today, and it is a process for which we have parallels. I think source critical answers remain the best explantion for what we see in the Pentateuch.