INTERTEXTUALITY AND THE "FINAL FORM" OF THE TEXT

by

JOHN BARTON Oxford

In the English-speaking world, there has been in the last twenty years or so a clear drift in the direction of exegesis of the "final form" of the text as the preferred style for biblical interpretation. There are at least two different conceptual bases for this shift. One is theo• logical, and is associated with so-called "canonical criticism".' The other is literary, and rests on the argument that the interpreter of any text, biblical or not, has a primary duty to interpret the text that lies before us, before (or instead of) being concerned with puta• tive earlier stages underlying that text. Where we are told in the Gospels that the disciples, as they go out on their preaching mis• sion, are to eat what is set before them, the motto of current bib• lical studies might be "Read what is set before you"." The drift has been so marked that it is now sometimes described as a paradigm shift, using Thomas Kuhn's controversial term from the history of science." It has produced a sharp cleft between the English- and the German-speaking worlds in biblical studies. One of the common features of "final form" exegesis is an inter• est in reading holistically, that is, reading the text in its final form as an aesthetic or communicative unity. Lack of interest in possible

1 See especially B.S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia and London : Fortress Press and SCM Press, 1979); Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context (London: SCM Press 1985); and Biblical Theology if the Old and New Testaments (London: SCM Press 1992). 2 See R. Alter, The Art if Biblical Narrative (London and Sydney, 1981); R. Alter and F. Kermode, The Literary Guide to the Bible (London, 1987); M. Sternberg, The Poetics if Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama if Reading (Bloomington, 1985); F. Kermode , The Genesis if Secrecy: On the Interpretation ifNarrative (Cambridge, MA, 1979); G. Josipovici, The Book if God:AResponse to the Bible (New Haven and London, Yale V.P. 1988). 3 See T.S . Kuhn , The Structure if Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962), and com• pare my comments in j. Barton, The Future if Old Testament Study (Oxford, 1993). 34 JOHN BARTON underlying source s issues in a suspicion that there never were any underlying sources anyway, or at least that they are irrelevant to the text as it now is. This produces a tendency to interpret the text as the kind of unity that older, "historical-critical" interpreters would have denied to it. Consequently "final form" exegesis make s common cause with something like rhetorical criticism, the attempt to show how the text is articulated as it stands.' "Final form " interpreters, like rhetorical critics, see their task as being to provide an account of the text which explains as part if its communicative intent even those features which in historical criticism were taken as evidence of dis• unity. We trace a progression of ideas which integrates every part into the greater whole. The result is that we perceive a single, coher• ent Gestalt in the text, to which every part of it contributes. T here are no loose ends, nothing superfluous or confusing. Once one sets out on this route, there is no logical reason to stop at any particular level within the biblical text. To take a now famil• iar example, Robert Alter has tried to show how Genesis 38, the story of Tam ar and Judah, is not the erratic block within the Joseph story that generations of commentators have believed, but can be read as perfectly well integrated into its narrative context." T he clue is the theme of recognition: Judah "recognizes" (in a technical, legal sense) the items he left with Tamar, just as he forced his own father Jacob to "recognize" Joseph's blood-stained coat. The theme of the brothers getting what they deserve through the way events unfold is thus present here just as much as in the rest of the story ofJ oseph, and there is no need to posit an interpolator who has inserted chap• ter 38 after the J oseph narrative was complete. But clearly such an argument, which depends on verbal connec• tions as well as on connections of theme, need not stop at the level of the (supposed) 'j oseph narrative". It can be applied, and Alter does apply it, to Genesis as a whole, or to the historical books as a whole. Thus he traces connections between widely separated narrative texts, established by identifying Leiuoorter and "type scenes". Along similar lines, other scholars have sought to find patterns that show the unity of the book of the Twelve," or the prophetic corpus as a

• See P. Trible, Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method, and theBook qfJonah (Minneapolis, 1994); see my discussion in J. Bart on, Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study (London, 1996), pp . 198-219. 5 See Alter , Art qf Biblical Narrative. 6 See ]. Nogalski, Redactional Processes in the Book qf the Twelve, BZAW 2 18 (Berlin,