"new" paper
07Sep09
I have just posted a new revision of an old paper that I would appreciate your feedback on. Critical feedback welcomed! Click on the “papers” tab, and then click on the Understanding Esther: A Tale of Two Feasts link… or just click here.
Fantastic paper Jeff! I greatly enjoyed it.
As I was reading, critiques and thoughts began popping up but for every one of them I had only to read on further and it was fully addressed.
God bless you brother!
I could tell that you like to choose your words carefully. This makes for tweaked idioms, and readers can only get the benefit when reading closely. Since the same ideas can be expressed in ordinary words, it could either create a sense of inefficient individualism, or cause the reader to think about the ideas more slowly and in depth.
I want to hear more about the “short story” genre in Hebrew literature. I know there are stories in the Bible, and the Hebrews probably had an oral story-telling tradition, too… but where do we find out the typical features to compare them with the story of Esther? Is there a difference in literary style between fictional stories and non-fiction stories? (Cf. what C.S. Lewis said about irrelevant details in the Gospels that distinguish them from myth.)
Of course, if Esther is historical, it can still be literary, by the way certain events were chosen as highlights. You seem to be arguing that God as mover of history and God as author of the Bible is working together to make a point. Does this mean that (a) history itself is poetic, (b) history is revealed as poetic to those who can see it correctly, or (c) poetry is created from history by those who choose to see it in that way?
Nathan,
Thank you for your thoughtful comments and questions.
Short story is a trans-cultural tradition that has common elements in every culture. Motif, characterization, plot and theme, especially, are elements used to express ideas in most well crafted short stories you read, from any culture or time period.
As it relates to the bible, I’m suggesting that God has decided to use human words to express divine insight. Not only isolated human words, but grammar, syntax, and stylistic artistic expression. His words are incarnated in human forms, much like Jesus was incarnated in human flesh. Poetic structures, plots, characterizations, literary allusions, and the like are all used in the bible to express ideas through respective type, genre, and literary structure. God strengthened and utilized the creative abilities of the human biblical authors to interpret history, and using these stylistic elements (among others), to bring us the inspired message. They were not simply recording the facts about what happened in the narrative accounts. Rather, they were taking objective historical data, and interpreting it for their audience, namely us.
While some stylistic elements were emphasized in the Semitic culture at the time (such as inclusio and chiasm), we are not so distanced from these artistic forms that it obscures our interpretation after careful observation.