The Literary Guide to the Bible
Frank Kermode
Language: English
Pages: 696
ISBN: 0674875311
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Rediscover the incomparable literary richness and strength of a book that all of us live with an many of us live by. An international team of renowned scholars, assembled by two leading literary critics, offers a book-by-book guide through the Old and New Testaments as well as general essays on the Bible as a whole, providing an enticing reintroduction to a work that has shaped our language and thought for thousands of years.
biblical books or parts of books are, as I noted earlier, preserved in the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls, several centuries after the original composition. The oldest integral manuscript of the Hebrew Bible is a whole millennium later. Ancient witnesses beginning with the Septuagint sometimes provide help in difficult places, but their variants of the Masoretic text often reflect glosses, misunderstandings, or dubious textual traditions. There are certainly no grounds for confidence that the Bible
But their principal importance in terms of narrative organization is that they thematize and GENESiS 43 explicate space and time, the fundamental coordinates of life and narrative, at the highest level of meaning. Space in Genesis is divided, ordered, and sanctified by the divine promise and is also promoted to the status of a theme: the origin, wanderings, and sojourns of the forefathers. Time, too, is ordered and, because of the promise, stands under a sign of expectation and fulfillment. In
sketch of the book's composition, I shall examine both the extent to which Exodus represents a continuation of Genesis and the new themes and specific features that make the second book a distinctive literary text in irs own right. The caesura marking the end of the first section of Exodus is signaled by dense and powerful poetic language. Chapter 15 is a hymn to the incomparability of YHWH, who has manifested himself as supreme over Israel and Egypt. This song of Moses beside the Reed Sea
strange dissonance in their new literary setting. For example, Moses' invitation to Hobab to accompany Israel to Canaan and partake of the divinely promised blessings sounds like wise policy when 10:29-32 is read out of context. Just as Moses had used the helpful advice of his in-laws in structuring a judicial system (Exod. 18), he asks these nomadic peoples to guide Israel through a wilderness with which they would be quite familiar. The context here stresses absolute divine control and
Kings, as it does in the Hebrew Bible. The essays on the prophets are not interrupted by Lamentations, regarded in the traditional versions as an appendix to Jeremiah. Daniel, the last written work of the Hebrew canon, is not here treated as belonging with the classical prophets. The Hebrew Bible groups its books in this sequence: Pentateuch, Former Prophets, Latter Prophets, miscellaneous Writings; and it suited our purposes to adopt this order. The essays on the New Testament follow the