Bully's Blog

The Bible so often seems to be very descriptive when we don’t want it to be (concerning architecture, for instance) and threadbare when it comes to the personal and illustrative detail we have been trained to enjoy and rely upon. When it comes to characterization especially, somehow the authors do a whole lot with very little. In fact, the unfathomable depth of what they do could not be achieved in any other way. What we moderns have often classed as primitive literature is in fact a literary world whose navigation requires one to keep one’s wits every step of the way. What is not said very often speaks volumes, especially when a passage is repeated with minor tweaks, additions or omissions. The Bible is most definitely smarter than we are, and its literary strategy can be traced back to Eden.

Robert Alter asks:

How does the Bible manage to evoke such a sense of depth and complexity in it representation of character with what would seem to be such sparse, even rudimentary means?

Biblical narrative offers us, after all, nothing in the way of minute analysis of motive or detailed rendering of mental processes; whatever indications we may be vouchsafed of feeling, attitude, or intention are rather minimal; and we are given only the barest hints about the physical appearance, the tics and gestures, the dress and implements of the characters, the material milieu in which they enact their destinies. In short, all the indicators of nuanced individuality to which the Western literary tradition has accustomed us—preeminently in the novel, but ultimately going back to the Greek epics and romances—would appear to be absent from the Bible.

In what way, then, is one to explain how, from these laconic texts, figures like Rebekah, Jacob, Joseph, Judah, Tamar, Moses, Saul, David, and Ruth emerge, characters who, beyond any archetypal role they may play as bearers of a divine mandate, have been etched as indelibly vivid individuals in the imaginations of a hundred generations?

It is true enough to say, as Erich Auerbach and others have done, that the sparely sketched foreground of biblical narrative somehow implies a large background dense with possibilities of interpretation, but the critical issue here is the specific means through which that “somehow” is achieved.

Though biblical narrative is often silent where later modes of fiction will choose to be loquacious, it is selectively silent and in a purposeful way: abut different personages, or about the same personages at different junctures in the narration, or about different aspects of their thought, feeling, behavior. I would suggest, in fact, that the biblical writers, while seeming to preserve a continuity with the relatively simple treatment of character of their Mesopotamian and Syro-Phoenecian literary predecessors [1], actually worked out a set of new and surprisingly supple techniques for the imaginative representation of human individuality.

Since art does not develop in a vacuum, these literary techniques must be associated with the conception of human nature implicit in biblical monotheism: every person is created by an all-seeing God but abandoned to his own unfathomable freedom, made in God’s likeness as a matter of cosmogonic principle but almost never as a matter of accomplished ethical fact; and each individual instance of this bundle of paradoxes, encompassing the zenith and the nadir of the created world, requires a special cunning attentiveness in literary representation. The purposeful selectivity of means, the repeatedly contrastive or comparative technical strategies used in the rendering of biblical characters, are in a sense dictated by the biblical view of man.

Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, pp. 114-115.

Less is more. And God is most certainly in the details.

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[1] I don’t believe the Torah was influenced by other literature, but instead that it influenced these other literary traditions.