Hebrew Scriptures and More . . . .

Go to: Part 2; Part 3, Part 4.

Charles Halton at Awilum.com has opened a discussion on Word Studies and Intertextuality that I want to participate in, but I wanted to present some basics first to expand the horizons. I hope this is acceptable and not too pedantic.

Intertextuality has been used in two separate, but intersecting ways in recent biblical scholarship.¹ On the one hand those that have been influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin² and/or Julia Kristeva have spread a wide net and have focused on issues such as dialogism and the carnivalques nature of some biblical texts. Following Heinrich F. Plett this usage may be designated as “progressive intertextuality.” On the other hand Michael Fishbane has been at the spearhead of the second usage of the term “intertextuality,” in which “inner-biblical exegesis”³ is his preferred nomenclature, although he also utilizes the term, “intertextuality”⁴ in his more recent writings. His usage is primarily diachronic, thereby differentiating his methodology from the more synchronous “inner-biblical allusions” approach. Plett would name this grouping, “traditional intertextuality.”

Progressive intertextuality may be used in a synchronic manner, although it cannot be said that Bakhtin would have limited intertextuality to a synchronic system since he showed great interest in an author and his/her background. Progressive intertextuality holds much promise when it comes to working with disparate biblical traditions or in biblical theology where the Old Testament and the New Testament constructs are not easily aligned. In this approach any text may be intertextually linked regardless of word or concept level similarities or disparities. The problem is justifying the relationship in someway or another.

Traditional intertextuality as it is summed up by Fishbane’s epic making study on inner biblical exegesis is as follows:

The whole phenomenon of inner-biblical exegesis requires the latter-day historian to appreciate the fact that the texts and traditions, the received traditum of ancient Israel, were not simply copied, studied, transmitted, or recited. They were also, and by these means, subject to redaction, elucidation, reformation, and outright transformation. Accordingly, our received traditions are complex blends of traditum and traditio in dynamic interaction, dynamic interpretation, and dynamic interdependence. They are, in sum, the exegetical voices of many teachers and tradents, from different circles and times, responding to real and theoretical considerations as perceived and as anticipated. To retrace this substantial achievement is, then, correspondingly to encounter traces of ancient Israelite exegetical thinking in its attentive relations to textual contexts and historical memories, in its complex correlations of traditions and situations, and literary form.⁵

Here, Fishbane has modified Douglas Knight’s⁶ differentiation of a traditum or “the content of tradition”⁷ and traditio, or “the process of transmission.”⁸ Knight used the latter when dealing with oral materials, but Fishbane applies it to written materials which needed further elucidation. Although Fishbane has been criticized for an inopportune usage of these Latin designations that are essentially synonymous, and the fact that they are used to mean the “primary text” and “secondary text,” or “commentary”⁹ respectively, his point is well taken that the biblical traditions have been modified and contextualized in different historical and generic settings. This series of intertextual modifications were utilized because on the one hand, the primary text was considered scripture and authoritative. On the other hand, necessary changes and expansions needed to be made in respect to the primary text. He writes:

. . . intertextuality is the core of the canonical imagination; that is, it is the core of the creative imagination that lives within a self-reflexive culture shaped by an authoritative collection of text. The main reason for this is that a canon (or whatever sort) presupposes the possibility of correlations among its parts, such that new texts may imbed, reuse, or otherwise allude to precursor materials – both as a strategy for meaning-making, and for establishing the authority of a given innovation. Put in a nutshell, . . . intertextuality is a form that literary creativity takes when innovation is grounded in tradition.”¹⁰

Ellen Davis unpacks this point by clarifying that traditio was a faithful transmission that should not be confused with an attempt to pass on the so-called authorial intent of the traditum. Rather it affirms on one hand, that “God has spoken to Israel” in the past¹¹ and yet on the other hand the biblical writers of the traditio were “free to disagree with their predecessors about how God’s will and word to Israel are to be interpreted.”¹² A major implication is that, “scribal-authorial tradents feel bound by the word received, the traditum, although in the process of “serving” it, they necessarily modify it. The inference would seem to be that faithful transmission of authoritative tradition must always be something more than rote repetition.”¹³

These alterations of the traditum were neither casual changes nor done with pernicious intent. Fishbane has argued that:

One of the features that emerges prominently is the fact that for inner-biblical exegesis there is no merely literary or theological playfulness. Exegesis arises out of a practical crisis of some sort – the incomprehensibility of a word or a rule, or the failure of the covenantal tradition to engage its audience. There is, then, something of the dynamic of “tradition and the individual talent” here – where the tradition sets the agenda of problems which must be creatively resolved or determines the received language which may be imaginatively reworked.¹⁴

An important corollary is that these alterations to the traditum had to be accepted by a community. As William Graham indicates, “A text becomes ’scripture’ in active, subjective relationship to persons, and as part of a cumulative communal tradition. No text, written or oral or both, is sacred in isolation from a community.”¹⁵ For Fishbane the dynamic process of inner biblical exegesis was part of the very ethos of enscripturation. In this vein a problem exists as to how pervasive literacy was in the history of Israel¹⁶ and to what extent verbalization was necessary to communicate the traditum/traditio process to the larger community. It was not till the early rabbinic period when the corpus of Scripture was considered closed and fixed that the lively interpretation tradition ceased.¹⁷

1 Heinrich F. Plett, “Intertextualities,” in Intertextuality, ed. Heinrich F. Plett, Research in Text Theory 15 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991), 3-29 describes the larger field of intertextual studies and divides it into the “progressive intertextualists,” who may be understood as postmodernist or deconstructionalist, while the “traditional intertextualists” deal more with quotations and allusion. See Timothy Ward, “The Diversity of Sufficiency of Scripture,” in The Trustworthiness of God: Perspectives on the Nature of Scriptures, ed. Paul Helm and Carl R. Trueman (Grand Rapids, MI & Cambridge, UK: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2002), 192-218. A slightly different approach has been taken by Mark Biddle, “Ancestral Motifs in 1 Samuel 25: Intertextuality and Characterization,” JBL 121, 4 (2002), 619-20, who makes a division between the readers making the connection between texts over against the authors making the connection.

2 L. Juliana Claassens, “The God Who Feeds: A Feminist-Theological Analysis of Key Pentateuchal and Intertestmental Texts,” (Ph.D., Princeton Theological Seminary, 2001); L. Juliana Claassens, “Biblical Theology as Dialogue: Continuing the Conversation on Mikhail Bakhtin and Biblical Theology,” JBL 122, no. 1, (2003), 127-144; Barbara Green, Mikhail Bakhtin and Biblical Scholarship: An Introduction, Semeia Studies, No. 38, (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000); Carol A. Newson, “Bakhtin, the Bible, and Dialogic Truth,” JR 76, No. 2, (1996), 290-306; Dennis Olson, “Biblical Theology as Provisional Monologization: A Dialogue with Childs, Brueggemann and Bakhtin,” BibInt 6 (1998), XX-XX; Walter L. Reed, Dialogues of the Word: The Bible as Literature According to Bakhtin, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

3 Eslinger has criticized Fishbane’s usage of the designation “inner-biblical exegesis” and opts for “inner-biblical allusions,” in Lyle Eslinger, “Inner-Biblical Exegesis and Inner-Biblical Allusions: The Question of Category,” VT 42, no. 1 (1992), 56. However Sommer has countered by positing that Eslinger has fused a historical and ahistorical (diachronic and synchronic) analysis. See Benjamin D. Sommer, “Exegesis, Allusion and Intertextuality in the Hebrew Bible: A Response to Lyle Eslinger,” VT 46, no. 4 (1996), 479.

4 Michael Fishbane, “Types of Biblical Intertextuality,” Congress Volume Oslo 1998, ed. A. Lemaire and M. Sæbø (Leiden/Boston/Köln: E. J. Brill, 2000), 39-44. Note Fishbane’s summary statement, “. . . intertextuality is a form that literary creativity takes when innovation is grounded in tradition.” (p. 39)

5 Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 542-3.

6 Douglas A. Knight, Rediscovering the Traditions of Israel, SBL Dissertation Series, no. 9, (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1975), 5-20.

7 Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, 6.

8 Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, 6.

9 James L. Kugel, “The Bible’s Earliest Interpreters,” Prooftexts 7, no. 3 (1987), 273.

10 Fishbane, “Types of Biblical Intertextuality,” 39.

11 In Michael Fishbane, “Revelation and Tradition: Aspects of Inner-Biblical Exegesis,” JBL 99, 3 (1980), 359-60, the fact that these texts were viewed with an “authoritative status” suggests to him an early “canonical consciousness” about them.

12 Ellen F. Davis, “Critical Traditioning: Seeking an Inner Biblical Hermeneutic,” ATR, 82, no. 4 (2000), 737-38. Fishbane, “Revelation and Tradition: Aspects of Inner-Biblical Exegesis,” 361, uses the term “exegetical consciousness” which is “simultaneously, a constructive and deconstructive consciousness; for it both asserts and denies the authority of the text in question.”

13 Davis, “Critical Traditioning: Seeking an Inner Biblical Hermeneutic,” 738.

14 Michael Fishbane, “Inner-Biblical Exegesis: Types and Strategies of Interpretation in Ancient Israel,” Chap. in The Garment of Torah (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 16.

15 William Graham, Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 5 as quoted in William M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 196.

16 See the recent work by David M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and the secondary literature cited there.

17 Michael Fishbane, “Inner-Biblical Exegesis: Types and Strategies of Interpretation in Ancient Israel,” Chap. in The Garment of Torah (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 18. John van Seters, “The Redactor in Biblical Studies: A Nineteenth Century Anachronism,” JNSL 29, no. 1 (2003), 13, has argued that for Fishbane, “scribe and sage are identical and that both are precursors of the rabbinic exegetical tradition and the Masoretic scribal and editorial tradition.” However, Fishbane does make a clear distinction based on the fixing or canon of scripture. See the full critique of Fishbane in John van Seters, The Edited Bible: The Curious History of the “Editor” in Biblical Criticism (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 376-89.

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