The Poetics of Biblical Narrative - Part 4

We are continuing to read page by page through The Poetics of Biblical Narrative by Meir Sternberg. If you are interested in learning how to read the Bible as a literary work of high genius, this book is critical. We are starting the first chapter: “Chapter 1: Literary Text, Literary Approach: Getting the Questions Straight.”

Sternberg opens the chapter with an epigraph from John Dryden:

The few by Nature form’d, with Learning fraught,
Born to instruct, as others to be taught,
Must study well the Sacred Page; and see
Which Doctrine this, or that, does best agree
With the whole Tenor of the Work Divine.

The idea of this quote, and what it encapsulates in many ways, is the whole picture of this book. As you work through the text—and Sternberg talks about this later in his discussion of gaps—the whole process of interpretation is the filling in of gaps. You are putting together the purpose, the meaning, the ideology of the author: what the author believes and is trying to communicate.

You are always working back and forth between that overarching vision of what you think the author is trying to communicate and the particularities, the specific words and phrases, of what you are reading. You have to fit them together: does this piece fit? You read a phrase and say, “Okay, I think he is trying to say this.” Then you move on to the next phrase. Now you have two phrases, and something has been added. You have to ask: is the meaning I gave to this episode still the same? Well, maybe I need to take away this little piece and put this other piece in. Then you get a third phrase, and you evaluate the first, the middle, and the last. You are constantly engaged in this exact dynamic: determining which doctrine this or that does best agree with the whole tenor of the divine work. You are continually building up the meaning of the text out of these small parts, and with each new word, you must slightly rearrange the whole structure.

The Journey of Discovery

This applies to each individual word and each phrase. That is one of the profound things many of these literary authors taught me. When you do literary interpretation, you understand that every single word contributes something. You must always ask yourself: why this word, in this way, right here? Why this phrase, in this way, right here? Why did the author say it this particular way rather than a different way? Why was Abraham’s proper name used here instead of a pronoun?

Many of us grew up with a different model. I do not say this to be overly critical, but simply as a description of how we learn to see things. You see this all the time in preaching: a preacher will stand up and say, “The point of this passage is X—it is about having faith in God, or praying during suffering,” or whatever the topic is.

I am not a fan of that practice, for a couple of reasons. The primary reason is that the entire biblical text is designed as a journey of discovery. Each specific wording adds upon the last, driving you closer toward something you do not see yet. When you reduce the text to a topical summary, you short-circuit that whole journey. You effectively say, “You have the moral or the principle now, so you don’t really need all the details of the text.”

What Meir Sternberg and similar authors do is redirect your attention squarely to each word and phrase. They constantly force you to ask: what does this specific choice tell you about the meaning of the text? What does this next detail tell you? It cultivates an extreme, disciplined attention and a skill of deep noticing, refusing to settle for a simplistic summary, because the text is always far deeper than that.

Communication, Means, and Ends

Sternberg asks:

What goals does the biblical narrator set himself? What is it that he wants to communicate in this or that story, cycle, or book?

This illustrates the exact progression I was just talking about. In the biblical text, you have the purpose of a sentence; then sentences are built into a paragraph, paragraphs into a story, and stories into a cycle of three stories. You can ask what the goal is at each level—the sentence, the story, the three-story cycle—rising into increasingly higher arcs of meaning.

Sternberg continues:

What kind of text is the Bible, and what role does it perform in context? What are all the variations on a fundamental question that students of the Bible would do well to pose loudly and sharply: the question of the narrative as a fundamental structure, a means to a communicative end, a transaction between the narrator and the audience on whom he wishes to produce a certain effect by way of certain strategies?

That transaction is what the entire book is examining. Those “certain strategies” are the poetics.

Like all social discourse, biblical narrative is oriented to an addressee and regulated by a purpose or a set of purposes involving the addressee.

The Bible is normal human communication in this fundamental sense. In all ordinary communication, a story is oriented to an addressee. You have someone communicating, someone receiving the communication, and an overarching purpose for which the transaction takes place. That is communication 101, and it is entirely true of the Bible.

Hence our primary business as readers is to make purposive sense of it—to explain the whats and the hows in terms of the whys of communication.

This goes straight to the heart of our task. Our job is to explain what happens, how it happens (the poetics, the literary mechanics), and why it happens (the ideology, the ultimate communicative purpose). We want to arrive at the final purpose, but to arrive at the final purpose of a text or a phrase, we have to understand the how and the what—the mechanics and the poetics that carry it.

The Reticent Narrator and Hypothesis Testing

Sternberg explains:

Posing such a question in the clearest terms is a condition for reasonable and systematic inquiry, rather than a panacea or a shortcut to human unanimity.

Raising the question of communicative purpose does not magically hand you an automatic, universally accepted formula where you just plug in numbers and get uniform answers. It is simply the starting point for reasonable, systematic inquiry and fruitful conversation.

The answers to it would doubtless still vary as well as agree, since the reticent narrator gives us no clue about his intentions except in and through his art of narrative.

There will inevitably be both agreement and disagreement among interpreters, precisely because the narrator in the Bible is reticent. He shows; he does not tell. The biblical author does not step out to explain his poetics. We have to reconstruct his system—his repertoire of communicative techniques—entirely by reading it off his art. We cannot interview the narrator, and the narrator rarely injects his personal commentary directly into the prose.

The biblical narrator rarely provides an explicit evaluation of his characters. He does not stop the narrative to say, “And this action was wrong, and Jacob was being selfish.” Instead, he demonstrates moral evaluations through narrative cause and effect, literary framing, and all the poetics we will be studying. The narrator sits back very quietly, which makes discovering his poetics considerably trickier.

Of course, that difficulty is part of the divine design: it is the glory of God to conceal a matter, and the glory of kings to search a matter out. Work is one of our fundamental callings from Genesis 1, and that includes intellectual work as well as physical work. The fact that we must labor to uncover this meaning is built into the normal structure of the world God made.

Sternberg then explains how we proceed:

To reconstruct the principles underlying the text’s givens, therefore, we must form hypotheses that will relate fact to effect.

It functions very much like science: you formulate a hypothesis about how the author works. For instance, Robert Alter frequently points out that the very first words spoken by a character in the biblical text are almost always freighted with immense importance, establishing their character or setting their trajectory in the plot. You pay close attention to those first words; they are never throwaway pleasantries. Biblical characters do not simply say, “Hi, I’m Bernice from around the corner,” in a way that plays no functional role in the story.

Once you have that hypothesis, you test it across numerous texts to see how well it explains the relationship between the facts on the page and their literary effect. Sternberg notes:

These may well differ in interpretive focus and explanatory power.

Is the thesis about initial speech true more often than not? As Sternberg emphasizes in his preface, the biblical authors are not rigidly bound by these conventions. God did not hand down an ironclad rulebook stating that an author has ten literary mechanisms and may use them only in prescribed ways. Authors bend, modify, and subvert techniques for specific ideological ends. Just because a convention does not apply identically in every single instance does not mean it is not a genuine poetic device. If the initial-speech rule holds true for eighty percent of characters, that is more than enough to recognize it as a standard feature of biblical poetic art.

Sternberg observes:

But even the differences, including those not or not immediately resolvable, would then become well-defined, intelligible, and fruitful.

The inquiry has a fractal quality. Take that example of character first words: suppose it clearly fits sixty percent of the time, while the remaining forty percent seems not to conform. You do not simply discard the inquiry; you examine those non-conforming instances to see whether further categorical divisions emerge. Among the primary instances, does the initial speech serve characterization, plot movement, or thematic contrast? In the secondary group, is a character’s speech being deployed ironically, where a noble first utterance masks subsequent villainy? Or does an insignificant, flat opening deliberately signal the minor stature of the character? Because the framework is anchored in communicative design, even the deviations become intelligible and fruitful categories of study.

Form and Function

Sternberg warns against divorcing form from function:

That they are not remarkable for being so in the present state of affairs is largely due to the tendency to read biblical text out of communicative context, with little regard for what they set out to achieve and the exigencies attaching to its achievement. Elements thus get divorced from the various terms of reference that assign them to their roles and meanings: parts from wholes, means to ends, forms from functions. Nothing could be less productive or more misleading. Even the listing of so-called forms and devices and configurations—a fashionable practice this, among aspirants to literary criticism—is no substitute for the proper business of reading.

You cannot merely catalogue a list of literary devices—pointing out characters, wordplays, or structures—and expect that mechanical inventory to spit out the meaning of the text. That is not reading.

It stands in stark contrast to the common modern habit of hasty “application,” where a reader skims the surface of a passage, extracts a quick moral, and runs off to apply it. You have to sit inside the text. You have to ask what was actually happening historically, why Moses recorded this particular detail, and why he framed it the way he did.

Think of Genesis: 99.99 percent of everything that happened during that vast expanse of history was not recorded. What was included was chosen with incredible selectivity, for highly specific ends. Sometimes, especially in books like Numbers or Chronicles, readers look at lists and genealogies and assume they are just passive, unshaped records of historical data. But the vast majority of historical data was left out; what remains is highly selected and organized.

James Jordan, for example, observes the larger narrative architecture in early Genesis: a repeated pattern of three sins followed by a fall and decreation. In the primeval history, you have the fall in Eden, the murder of Abel, and the sons of God taking the daughters of men, culminating in the Flood. Then after the Flood, you see the sin of Ham, the rebellion of the nations, and the Tower of Babel. You expect a third cataclysmic judgment, but instead the pattern breaks and God calls Abraham. If you are reading any individual text within that sequence, you must locate its specific communicative context within the larger design. You cannot grasp the true force of a passage until you have sat patiently within its literary context for a long time.

The Danger of Atomism

Sternberg writes:

Since a sense of coherence entails a sense of purpose, it is not enough to trace a pattern; it must also be validated and justified in terms of communicative design.

For something to cohere, it must have purpose. It is never enough merely to spot a formal pattern, whether an overarching structural rhythm or a recurring poetic device like character first words. You must justify that pattern in terms of communicative design: how does this specific technique serve the ideological purpose and theological end of the narrative?

This is where so much analysis of biblical allusions falls short. Identifying an allusion requires two distinct steps. First, you must determine what prior text or event is being alluded to. But the second step, which is frequently neglected, is asking why the author made that allusion. What work does it perform in this specific context? If you do not answer that second question, then, as Sternberg writes, the pattern remains neither validated nor justified. Poetic techniques do not exist for their own sake; they exist to serve the communicative purpose.

After all, the very question of whether that pattern exists in the text, whether it has any relevance and any claim to perceptibility, turns on the question of what it does in the text. Unless firmly anchored in the relations between the narrator and the audience, therefore, formalism degenerates into a new form of atomism.

If your formal analysis is not anchored in the communicative relationship between author and audience, you end up with mere atomism. You dissect the text, identify a gap here, an analogy there, an allusion somewhere else, and lay out the pieces like disassembled parts.

It is like someone buying a massive, intricate Lego kit—say, the Millennium Falcon—and saying, “I really want to understand this model.” So they take it completely apart, sort every brick by shape and size into little piles, and announce, “Now I understand it!” You have atomized the object into its constituent components; you have labeled every brick and identified every strut. But do you actually understand the Millennium Falcon any better? Not at all.

This is shockingly common in academic commentaries. You can read a scholarly volume and learn an immense amount about the Hebrew and Greek grammar, syntactic structures, and formal textual divisions, yet walk away having no idea what the passage is actually about. Losing sight of the author’s primary communicative purpose is easily one of the top three problems in contemporary biblical commentaries, and Sternberg puts his finger directly on it.

Every word, sentence, episode, and literary device exists in a hierarchical, organic relationship, building toward the final communicative arc: what the text was written to accomplish. In any healthy organism—or in the body of Christ—every part has an indispensable role, but always in service of the whole. In biblical interpretation, it is astonishing how easily that governing whole is forgotten.

Watch the original episode.