Reading The Art of Biblical Narrative, however, changed my entire sense of what I was reading when I read the Bible, and brought the narratives of the Pentateuch and the Former Prophets to life for me in a way that most works of biblical criticism-with a few notable exceptions-simply never had. I suspect, however, that I had somehow acquired the prejudice against literary approaches that was unfortunately once quite common amongst orthodox practitioners of historical criticism, as if reading the biblical texts for their literary qualities was either to avoid the real intellectual rigours of historical criticism, the painstaking task of setting the biblical texts in their ancient contexts and reconstructing their literary genesis and growth, or alternatively to mis-categorize the biblical texts altogether, to read them as something they were not. It should have done, of course, as I certainly was familiar with some of the works of David Clines (I had, for example, read his 1976 monograph I, He, We, and They: A Literary Approach to Isaiah 53 as an undergraduate) and David Gunn (I discovered his brilliant 1980 work The Fate of King Saul: An Interpretation of a Biblical Story while preparing lectures on the books of Samuel), and there is in any case no excuse for being so badly read, especially in major works published so long before. Equally, it had never occurred to me to approach the biblical texts, in my research and teaching, as literary works (let alone to try and join the dots between the different approaches, which is a vitally important task in a field that at times seems to be made up of a series of echo chambers, each as convinced as the next that its own terms of debate are the right ones). Despite the context in which I was teaching, and despite the fact that I regularly preached-as I still do-from the lectionary, it had never occurred to me to engage theologically with the biblical texts in the classroom, to read them as Scripture, partly no doubt because that was not how I had been taught. This subjective impression perhaps had more to do with a prevailing sense of listless exhaustion (mercifully long past) than with any substantial objection to historical criticism as such, but there was an inescapable sense of something missing. It did not take me long to realise that such approaches were not only alienating to many of my students, but had started to become more than a little dry and tedious to me. When I subsequently began teaching, it was historical-critical approaches that were the basis for my lectures, not so much because I thought that this was the only right way to teach Scripture in a theological college (something I would seriously question now), but because these were the only approaches I really knew. These were the methods I took into my doctoral research at Sheffield, though my contemporaries there all seemed to be doing much more interesting things with the biblical texts in conversation with a variety of postmodern theorists (whose work I had also never read). As an undergraduate in Manchester, I had studied the biblical languages and had been quite thoroughly schooled in the methods of historical criticism. I had vaguely heard of Alter’s work, and had a faint sense of having heard of the book, though I had never read it (it was first published in 1981, with a second edition appearing in 2011). The combination of post-thesis blues (also familiar to many academics) and the stress of preparing classes on unfamiliar topics in an environment far from home had begun to take its toll, and I was not at all sure that I any longer had either the interest or the enthusiasm to keep me going in a teaching career I had begun more by accident than by design.īrowsing a bookstall one day that sweltering summer in Toronto, I came across a slender paperback by Robert Alter entitled The Art of Biblical Narrative. I had defended my doctoral thesis a few months earlier, on a subject only tangentially related to the classes I was teaching, and was still very much in that difficult period, only too familiar to most academics, of trying to stay far enough ahead of my students to be able to teach with even a modicum of authority. During the summer of 2002, I spent a few weeks in Toronto at the end of a somewhat stressful year teaching Old Testament at a theological college in the Caribbean.
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