Basic Plots in the Bible

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 198-213
Author(s):  
Harry Hagan
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Narrative Tradition ◽  
Form Criticism

In The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (2004), Christopher Booker names seven basic plots: overcoming the monster (battle), rags to riches, the journey quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, and rebirth; to these he adds three subplots: call and commission, trials, and temptations. Booker argues that these plots shape the stories we tell and provide a key to their meaning for us. This article shows that biblical stories from both the Old and New Testaments use and combine these basic plots and subplots to create biblical narratives. Besides providing a way of identifying the connection between stories, these categories also offer a context for understanding what is distinctive about each story and about the biblical narrative tradition. As such, these basic plots and subplots offer another strategy for the analysis of genre (form criticism).

Global Thefts of Biblical Narrative

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald West
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
African Experience ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Family Resemblances ◽  
African Perspective ◽  
The Subject

This chapter takes its starting point from the African experience, across a range of African contexts, of Africa as both the subject and object of biblical narrative. When the Bible came to Africa, it came with well-established colonial metanarratives, constructed in part from biblical narratives. These colonial metanarratives were in turn partly reconstructed by the engagement with African others, from both a European and an African perspective along two diverging trajectories, with biblical narrative making a contribution to both. This chapter focuses on the capacity of biblical narrative, biblical story, to be both incorporated into “local” metanarratives and to shape these metanarratives. The contexts that are the focus of this chapter are largely “third world” contexts, across which there are significant family resemblances and important contextual differences.

ELE NOS DEU HISTÓRIAS: EXEMPLOS DE INTERTEXTUALIDADE ENTRE A NARRATIVA BÍBLICA E A OBRA DE MACHADO DE ASSIS "He gave us stories: examples of intertextuality between the biblical narrative and the work of Machado de Assis"

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (10) ◽  
pp. 267
Author(s):  
Alexandre De Jesus dos Prazeres
Keyword(s):  
Machado De Assis ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives

O foco deste texto é despertar o interesse pelo estudo da Bíblia, não somente devido ao seu valor como texto de religião, mas principalmente pelo seu valor literário. E, para isto, o artigo demonstrará, de modo breve, algumas características da narrativa bíblica; e por meio do conceito linguístico de intertextualidade, apresentará alguns exemplos da influência das narrativas bíblicas em textos do escritor brasileiro, Machado de Assis.Palavras-chave: Bíblia. Literatura. Interface. Hermenêutica.AbstractThe focus of this text is to awaken interest in the study of the Bible, not only because of its value as text religion, but mainly for their literary value. And for this, the article will demonstrate, briefly, some features of the biblical narrative, and through the linguistic concept of intertextuality. It will show some examples of the influence of the biblical narratives in the texts of the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis.Keywords: Bible. Literature. Interface. Hermeneutics.

Ancient Israel's Neighbors

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian R. Doak
Keyword(s):  
Nearest Neighbors ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Social ◽  
Family Level ◽  
The Face ◽  
Social Turmoil

The purpose of this book is to tell the story of Israel’s nearest neighbors—not only discovering what the Bible has to say about them but also what we can know from archaeology, ancient inscriptions, and other sources. The Bible itself presents these neighbors in nuanced and conflicting ways; sometimes they are friends or even related to Israel at a family level, and sometimes they are enemies, spoken of as though they must die in order for Israel to live. We are left wondering how the biblical portrayal might have affected our thinking about these people as historical groups, on their own terms. How would an Aramaean have described her own religion? How would an Edomite have described conflict with Israel? This book explores both the biblical portrayal of the smaller groups surrounding Israel and what people can know about these groups through their own literature, archaeology, and other sources. By uncovering the identity of the Philistines as settlers along the coast at the same time that early Israel carved out their place in the land, for example, one can better understand the social turmoil and political maneuvering that lies just beneath the surface of the biblical narrative, and can see more clearly just how the authors of the Bible saw themselves in the face of others.

Children in Biblical Narrative and Childist Interpretation

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Gallagher Elkins ◽  
Julie Faith Parker
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Children And Youth ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
Significant Development ◽  
Step Process ◽  
Child Characters ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Fresh Perspective

This chapter maintains that child characters have been long overlooked in biblical scholarship and calls attention to their critical roles in shaping the texts of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. After a summarizing overview of recent scholarship, the chapter briefly discusses Hebrew and Greek terms that indicate children and youth. It proposes a new methodology, calledchildist interpretation, which offers tools for discovering the role and importance of young characters in biblical narratives. This six-step process then serves as a vehicle for analyzing the stories of Naaman’s slave girl (2 Kings 5:1–14) and Herodias’s daughter (Mark 16:7–29). By questioning traditional hegemonic interpretive assumptions from a fresh perspective, childist interpretation heralds an innovative and significant development in biblical narrative analysis.

Sustenance and Survival in Biblical Narrative

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. Koosed
Keyword(s):  
Religious Identity ◽  
Food Production ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
Adam And Eve ◽  
Early Judaism ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
Class Status ◽  
Cultural Code ◽  
Shape Characterization

Food is a comprehensive cultural code. In ancient Israel and early Judaism, food production and preparation structured lives; what one did in the process was determined by gender and class status and sometimes even marked by ethnic and religious identity. Food also serves to structure narrative, shape characterization, and add layers of symbolic signification to story. In the Bible, the drama of the first few chapters revolves around proper versus improper eating, and the final book portrays God as a lamb sacrificed for the Passover meal. Between picking and tasting the forbidden fruit, and slaughtering and eating God, a whole host of food-related plots, characters, and images proliferate, many of which revolve around the most important of foodstuffs: bread. This chapter explores the centrality of bread in the story of Adam and Eve, the book of Ruth, and the gospels of Jesus.

The Artist as Reader of the Bible. Visual Exegesis and the Adoration of the Magi

2005 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 337-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin O'Kane
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
Image Viewer ◽  
The Bible ◽  
History Of ◽  
Entire History ◽  
Visual Exegesis ◽  
Textual Meaning

AbstractThe article explores the processes at work in a painting's engagement of its viewer in biblical subject matter. It accentuates the role of the artist as an active reader of the Bible and not merely an illustrator of biblical scenes, the dynamic that occurs in the text-reader process as paradigmatic for the image-viewer relationship and the important role of the developing tradition that felt the need to change or rewrite the biblical story. The processes are explored in terms of hermeneutics and exegesis: hermeneutics defined as 'the interweaving of language and life within the horizon of the text and within the horizons of traditions and the modern reader' (Gadamer) and exegesis as 'the dialectic between textual meaning and the reader's existence' (Berdini). Applied to the visualization of biblical subject matter, the approaches of Gadamer and Berdini illumine the key role given to the viewer in the visual hermeneutical process. The biblical story of the adoration of the Magi (Matt. 2: 1-12), the first public and universal seeing of Christ and one of the most frequently depicted themes in the entire history of biblical art, is used to illustrate their approach. The emphasis in the biblical narrative on revealing the Christ child to the reader parallels a key concept in Gadamer's hermeneutical aesthetics, namely Darstellung, the way in which a painting facilitates its subject matter in coming forth, in becoming an existential event in the life of the viewer.

Biblical Israel in the Ninth Century?

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
PHILIP R. DAVIES
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Critical History ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
United Monarchy ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Crucial Part

Most archaeologists of ancient Israel still operate with a pro-biblical ideology, while the role that archaeology has played in Zionist nation building is extensively documented. Terms such as ‘ninth century’ and ‘Iron Age’ represent an improvement on ‘United Monarchy’ and ‘Divided Monarchy’, but these latter terms remain implanted mentally as part of a larger portrait that may be called ‘biblical Israel’. This chapter argues that the question of ‘biblical Israel’ must be regarded as distinct from the kingdoms of Israel and Judah as a major historical problem rather than a given datum. ‘Biblical Israel’ can never be the subject of a modern critical history, but is rather a crucial part of that history, a ‘memory’, no doubt historically conditioned, that became crucial in creating Judaism. This realization will enable us not only to write a decent critical history of Iron Age central Palestine but also to bring that history and the biblical narrative into the kind of critical engagement that will lead to a better understanding of the Bible itself.

The Southern Levant and the Ancient Near Eastern Canon

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-65
Author(s):  
Rachel Hallote
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Southern Levant ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

When the artistic canon of the Southern Levant coalesced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars thought of the region, then Ottoman Palestine, as the locus of the Bible. The small-scale nature of the archaeological finds as well as their relative dearth reinforced a reliance on biblical narratives as a framework for understanding the culture of the region. Moreover, early scholarship did not recognize the complex regionalism of the Southern Levant or the diversity of its populations. Consequently, the artistic canon that developed did not represent the historical and archaeological realities of the region. This chapter examines the history of how the artistic canon of the Southern Levant formed over the past century of scholarship, why various scholars of the early and middle twentieth century included particular items in the canon, and why these now entrenched representations may or may not be helpful to the discipline’s future.

Behind Auerbach's “Background”: Five Ways to Read What Biblical Narratives Don't Say

AJS Review ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-150
Author(s):  
James Adam Redfield
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Research And Teaching ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Contemporary Work

The Hebrew Bible's narrative style has impressed interpreters of many periods and perspectives with its powerful tension between fragmentary speech and meaningful silence, summed up in Erich Auerbach's famous thesis that the Akedah is “fraught with background.” But is it possible to give a coherent account of what the Bible does not say? This article offers a comparative critical analysis of attempts to do just that, starting with Auerbach's Mimesis (1946) and continuing through the contemporary work of James Kugel, Robert Alter, Meir Sternberg, Avivah Zornberg, and others. It claims that, rather than the text itself, the Bible's “background” serves as a metaphor by which the biblical critic navigates a complex relationship with her own normative construct of the reader's mind. This comparison concludes with practical considerations about its potential for research and teaching in biblical poetics, understood as rigorous intersubjective communication, rather than as either method or ideology.

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