READING THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE: TWO QUESTIONS FOR BIBLICAL CRITICS

Author(s): John Barton

Source: Literature and Theology , September 1987, Vol. 1, No. 2 (September 1987), pp.
135-153
Published by: Oxford University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23924405

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Journal of Literature & Theology, Vol. 1, No. 2, September 1987

READING THE BIBLE AS

LITERATURE: TWO QUESTIONS
FOR BIBLICAL CRITICS
John Barton

A recently published layman's guide to medieval literature by J. A.

Burrow, entitled Medieval Writers and their Work: Middle English Literature
and its Background 1100—1500 (Oxford, 1982), seems to me to raise some issues
that might profitably engage the attention of biblical scholars. Two
questions in particular deserve an airing. The first represents something of a
challenge to the traditional kind of historical criticism with which all
students of the Old and New Testaments are familiar, and suggests that ideas
drawn from the newer 'literary' approaches to the Bible may turn out to be
needed even by those who retain a commitment to the historical-critical
method; the second, by contrast, casts some doubt on the more far-reaching
claims of these newer approaches and argues for a substantial continued use
of historical criticism. I make no attempt to cast a balance at the end between
the advantages and drawbacks of the rival camps in contemporary biblical
study.

I. IS HISTORICAL CRITICISM ANACHRONISTIC?

The thinking behind this rather paradoxical questio

by Burrow's work, but I can set it out more easily
obliquely, first making a couple of general obse
criticism in all its branches, and then turning to bib
by way of some pregnant suggestions made by Bu

i. Aesthetic theories, and especially theories of liter

strange paradox. Almost all attempts to state a gene
are ostensibly intended to cover all kinds of art; bu
always take their cue from the art of some partic
movement. In the realm of literary theory this is
'Classical' or 'Romantic' theories of literature ap
competing statements of the kinds of meaning it
literature—any work—to express. Broadly speaking
aesthetics will find the meaning of a literary work
© Oxford University Press 1987

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 136 READING THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE

parts, the formal character of its composition, an

of the ideas it expresses. Romantic theories, on
themselves chiefly with the thoughts or emotions
work is seen as an almost compulsive expression.
traditionally been 'intentionalist', but classical ty
led to an interest in the meaning which the text i
and composition (as in the so-called 'New Cri
theorists have usually located the work's meaning
of which it is no more than a vehicle. In princip
meaning in art should be universally applicabl
knows, critics have concentrated—sometimes
that are specially congenial to their own theory.
by gradual stages into literary preference; or, to p
preference leads to the erection of a framework of t
only the theorist's preferred types of writing w
'literature'.
Thus the neo-classicism of Pound and Eliot and their followers did not in
practice lead to new ways of reading the Romantics, but rather to a shift in
literary taste, rehabilitating the Augustans and the more contrived produc
tions of the Metaphysicals. Thus also the more recent trends that outsiders, at
least, call 'structuralist' began as an attempt to see literary meaning as
inhering in the conventional systems within which literature operates, but
quickly turned into a revolutionary programme to change the sort of
literature that should be produced. Theories which begin as apparently
descriptive systems ('Literature is X') very soon become prescriptive codes
('Good literature is X') and thence criteria for excommunication ('Only X is
literature'). We certainly now have enough historical distance from the early
nineteenth century to see this process clearly at work in the Romantic
movement, where Wordsworth's formulation in the Preface to Lyrical
Ballads (1800), "All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings", very soon ceased to be a principle for understanding all good
poetry and became the charter for writing poetry that understood itself in
these terms. Poets, in consequence, began to see their 'vocation' (itself rather
a new idea) in terms of cultivating certain kinds of emotion which could be
distilled into verse, rather than in terms of acquiring various formal skills.
And it was only a small step then to dismiss from the literary canon poets
whose own understanding of their task was clearly defective when measured
against such a standard: exeunt Pope and Dryden.
This means, what is no doubt obvious in any case, that the history of
literature and the history of literary criticism are tightly inter-woven. There
is generally a considerable overlap between the kind of literature being
produced in any period, and the styles of aesthetic theory then in vogue.

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 JOHN BARTON 137

Poets in most ages are also critics, a

view of what art is; and there is a
theory and their practice. It is r
Wordsworth found himself writing ve
a 'classical' theory; he developed a t
poet's emotions; this in turn stimula
Romantic verse. Sometimes, it is true,
which we feel constrained to underst
have been available to the poet him
that Donne was 'really' a Romanti
articulated to himself a Romantic th
hundred years longer to find consc
there is a strong correlation betwee
point to be made by way of introduc
literary theorists (not necessarily v
literature exercise a considerable const
themselves written in any given per
2. What critical approach should
literature from the past? Each age has
and it is possible to chart the course
best classification schemes which ena
developed is provided by M. H. Abr
the Lamp (1953),1 and elsewhere I ha
apply it to understanding the directi
taking.2 Until the early years of th
most literary critics since Wordswo
the primary question critics would a
from it about the author, and espec
life. But this approach has been suc
Eliot and his school, already referred
of formalism, mainly originating in
are forms of 'post-structuralism' suc
interest moves away not only from
and focuses instead on the process o
In biblical studies, for various reaso
affinities with the Romantic style o
for nearly two hundred years, and
biblical critics have begun to take an
as yet are perceived by most biblica
alternative to historical criticism. Fo
will distinguish simply between a
meaning by 'literary' any way of study

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138 READING THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE

immanent to the text itself. Some 'literary' approache

common with the 'New Criticism' (this is true of B.
approach'), others with structuralism, but they all co
traditional historical criticism that they seem, from
traditional biblical scholar, to form a single family. Fo
therefore, it will probably be sufficient to divide lite
into 'historical' and 'non-nistorical' or 'aesthetic', und
category to include all theories of literature in which
text itself independently of the intentions or wishes
comparatively crude division within the complex wo
studies, but it will serve our immediate concerns we
literary and the biblical worlds the impetus towards
chronic') study of texts has been born of a certain
apparent irrelevance of much traditional historical (
contemporary appreciation of texts. Both literary an
come to ask 'What does this text mean now?'; they ha
an exclusive concern with what it meant when it wa
after all, may be dead, but his work is still with us;
it as it stands, and leave the dead to bury the dead?
The decision that is required of the critic here is no
from within the discipline of critical study itself; it
metacritical question, involving various philosophica
carry us well outside literary studies. It is no part of the
to try to resolve it. The point which is to be made h
critic must make a decision; any critical judgmen
literary work or on a biblical text must be either hist
in character. There is no middle way. To opt for
alternative means that all suggestions about the text
justified in terms of features within the text as rea
questions of the author's intention, even of the author's
irrelevant. Such a reading can never coherently b
ronism, since it is not making historical proposals ab
have been understood when it was written: it is askin
it stands. To opt, on the other hand, for the histori
committed to asking questions about what the author
meant it to mean; to be interested in the quest for ipsiss
possible information about the literary conventions o
to want to get inside the author's mind, and to find
was doing in writing such a work. These are the
historical criticism, and they rule out suggestions for
that rest on (for example) reading as a whole a wo
fragmentary, or finding ambiguity in terms whi

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 JOHN BARTON 139

written had only one meaning. T

exclusive. At the metacritical level the choice between them is clear-cut and

admits of no compromise.
Starting with these two preliminary observations, I now want to suggest
that some very tangled questions arise as soon as we try to combine them.

11

Neither a biblical nor a literary critic is faced with any great problems if he
opts for the non-historical approach, and seeks to explicate a text by
examining its internal relations and structures. Historical criticism, however,
needs to deal with a problem which is not readily apparent, but which
appears as soon as we tease out the implications of the preliminary
observations above. The historical critic is presumably committed to taking
into account not only the words of a writer, but also his underlying
assumptions and beliefs. Unlike the non-historical, 'synchronic' or 'text
immanent' reading, historical criticism is not concerned merely with the
surface of the text, but with the historical conditions under which its author
wrote, including (among other things) the conventions of literature that
were available to him and under whose constraints he operated. It is for this
reason that critics are not content to specify the genre of an old text by
reference to modern genres, but take trouble to reconstruct and understand
the genres that were actually available when the text studied was being
written. One cannot understand Homer historically without some knowl
edge of the existence of epic as a genre; and since epic no longer exists as a
live option in modern literature, this inevitably entails a good deal of work
in the history of literature as a necessary preparation for understanding
Homer. In the same way, historical biblical critics would claim that we can
understand Proverbs only if we have some knowledge of the conventions of
ancient wisdom literature, another genre or set of genres that has more or
less ceased to exist. So much is reasonably obvious, and indeed it is attention
to historical questions of this kind that marks off proper historical criticism
from the casual, uninformed reading of texts that so easily leads to shallow
and anachronistic literary judgments.
Now among the conventions of literature within which any author of the
past worked, and which we try with great effort to reconstruct as a
precondition of understanding ancient literature, will be some kind of
consensus, however inarticulate, about what sort of thing literature is, what
it is to be a writer, and what kind of meaning literary works are supposed to
have: in short, some sort of theory of literature or theory of art. As I argued
in the first preliminary point above, the theory and practice of literature are
intimately interlinked, and part of the mental furniture of any writer—
which as historical critics we are obliged to attend to—is some notion of

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140 READING THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE

what literature is and of how it ought to be written.

example: to understand Wordsworth's poems, from
view, we need to know what Wordsworth saw as the
of poetry. The fact that he embraced a 'Romantic
irrelevant to understanding the actual poems he wro
also relatively uncontroversial. The information a
includes information about the basic approach to
author he is studying, whether that view is conscious
by many of the Romantics—or is more a matter of
an unquestioned set of expectations which the write
formulated even to himself. In this second case the
harder, but may not be shirked on that account. This
to know if we are to understand a poet fully.
The question, however, to which this apparently st
sion is leading is this. What happens when the historic
author who himself held (consciously or unconscio
theory of literature? Suppose we are reading an auth
that the meaning of the very words he is in the act
depend on his intentions and is not conditioned b
language or literature operative at the time of writi
words themselves as part of an artefact which passes,
the author's control? Such a situation seems to make historical criticism
difficult, to say the least, since the author (who for the historical critic is
crucial) seems to be systematically refusing the role in which historical
criticism casts him, and falsifying the reader's reasonable expectations. The
problem is similar to that facing a critic trying to write 'classicist' criticism of
the Romantics, only ten times worse. It may seem perverse, indeed it
probably is perverse, to analyse Wordsworth's poems according to classical
criteria, asking all the time about the prosody or the construction instead of
concentrating, as the poet himself would want us to, on the emotional states
being expressed. Many of Dr Johnson's criticisms of Shakespeare, whom we
are apt to see as a kind of Romantic before this time, seem nowadays to be
tinged with some such perversity: for example, Johnson often applies a
heavy test of verisimilitude, a 'classical' virtue in poetry, in places where to
us (and no doubt to Shakespeare too) it appears inappropriate. But at least
classical and Romantic theories share, as we have seen, a common commit
ment to the author's intention as a relevant criterion for meaning. Words
worth would have disagreed with Johnson about what sorts of intentions
authors might properly have—Johnson required a desire to instruct,
Wordsworth a longing to communicate profound emotion—but they
would have agreed, in general terms, that a poem meant what its author
meant by it. The contradiction between author and critic we are envisaging

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 JOHN BARTON 141

at the moment goes well beyond th

the critic is insisting on asking abo
all the time the author is denyin
historical criticism regards the aut
crucial, the historical critic will pr
view of the matter; yet to accept w
that historical criticism is actually in
the author's 'intention' is to produ
yield the paradoxical conclusion
approach would result, in such c
historical mode of criticism.
Stated in this way, this may appear merely as a logical paradox, and
indeed my point has obvious affinities with problems in philosophical logic
such as the self-referring propositions and riddles studied by Russell and
Frege: the village barber who shaves all men who do not shave themselves
and is then frozen into logical paralysis when asked whether or not he shaves
himself, the Cretan who affirms that all Cretans are liars and therefore does
not qualify for either our belief or our disbelief, and the rest of the
Kafkaesque characters in the logicians' menagerie. Such paradoxes are of
interest, no doubt, to philosophers, but have little appeal for the average
literary critic, still less perhaps for the average biblical critic, who might at
this point in our discussion merely reassert his traditional belief that criticism
of criticism is a sophisticated excuse for ignoring the biblical text, and read
no further. Whether or not the theoretical discussion of such convoluted
issues is worthwhile, however, it cannot be said that the situation I have
constructed is an unreal one. Indeed, a few examples will show, I hope, that
it is actually rather common, much commoner than one might suppose, and
that it raises a number of awkward practical questions which practical critics
of the Bible ought to give some thought to, since they affect even what we
might call the purely exegetical, no-nonsense level of biblical study.

hi

It is true that the examples which lie readiest to hand come fr

literature. There are, for example, stories about T. S. Eliot which
unwillingness to say what he meant by his poems except by rep
in the same words: the best-known is the anecdote about the un
who asked him what he meant by "Lady, three white leopards
juniper tree", to whom Eliot replied that he meant "Lady, t
leopards sat under a juniper tree". Eliot was not, we may suppose
awkward (though he was probably also being awkward); having
text for public consumption, he did not believe that he retained
over its meaning. This has undoubtedly raised problems for crit

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142 READING THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE

who wish nevertheless to relate his poems to his life and

tended to force them into a rather modest style of criticis
discover why he wrote the poems he did, rather than clai
the meaning of the poems. In other words, critics have be
the sorts of difficulty I have in mind in the case of an an
author such as Eliot, and have had to work within the constraints this
imposes.
Even clearer examples could be found in the literature produced by
authors of a more or less 'structuralist' turn of mind. The tendency of critics
to concentrate on works amenable to their own literary theories means that
most criticism of such writers comes from within the structuralist camp
itself, and so is not historical in character; but one of the problems traditional
critics complain of in structuralist literature is precisely the one I have
mentioned, that it seems deliberately designed to elude their normal critical
categories. The hatred of structuralism and all its works that can be found in
run-of-the-mill newspaper criticism of avant-garde fiction evinces a clear
sense that such writers are not playing by the rules, that they are trying to
put themselves above criticism. Writers who refuse to have intentions about
the meaning of their own works induce in the critic a sort of paralysis; the
impotence that the critic feels tends to come out in an undifferentiated
rejection of them all.
It would not be true, however, to say that the problem we are considering
is confined to the criticism of modern literature; and it is here, at last, that I
turn to the work of Professor Burrow, which makes this abundantly clear.
As a medievalist who is sensitive to the pressures of modern literary theory,
Burrow draws a number of striking contrasts between medieval and modern
literature—most of which are not controversial, but which are nevertheless
not always given due weight in criticism. For example, in describing the role
of the audience in the production of literature in the Middle Ages, he writes:

People in the Middle Ages treated books rather as musical scores are treated
today. The normal thing to do with a written literary text, that is, was to
perform it, by reading or chanting it aloud. Reading was a kind of performance.
Even the solitary reader most often read aloud, or at least muttered, the words
of his text—performing it to himself, as it were—and most reading was not
solitary. The performance of a text was most often a social occasion.3

Now this sense that the literary work exists in its performance, rather than
having its being on the written or printed page, has possible consequences
for the location of literary meaning. Meaning is not so squarely in the hands
of the author in an age which 'performs' its literature as it is in our entirely
bookish literary culture.

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 JOHN BARTON 143

This complication is greatly enha

other comments on Middle English
in the way a written (or printed) te
difference in what is supposed to b
For us, there is a clear distinction b
'producing a book' as a physical
words. "What is not composition
think it absurd for someone to say
because he had forgotten how to m
writing is essentially a continuum,
should call the author, and any giv
that continuum. Even highly creati
people's words into their own te
rearrange, condense, gloss, and emend
literary works as the product of a
modern reader's stupefaction, med
the very creativity for which we a
be collecting older material when t
great age of the manuscript book"

conditions encouraged a certain 'inte

Few works have the free-standing i
generally aspire; most are related to
or translation, or even simple trans
interest us this dependence upon oth
writer himself will often encourage
role of translator or compiler when
prime place'. The creative act of the a
protect or excuse it.5

Granted that this modest assertion

a literary convention the reasons f
and it clearly lies in a markedly dif
role of a writer is. The historical crit
key to a text's meaning runs into
modern literature in which interte
the detailed intentions of authors who understood themselves to be
producing for public performance texts that were primarily a compilation
and re-ordering of older texts, is to ask an anachronistic question. To invoke
the paradox again, only modes of criticism that are in some measure non
historical appear to be satisfactory on historical grounds.
I do not think the implications of this discussion for the study of the Bible,

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144 READING THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE

and especially of the Old Testament, are difficult to

siderably greater extent than with medieval literature, t
the Old Testament are either anonymous or pseudonym
and more of historical criticism has demonstrated that t
composite, the accumulation of generations of transcrip
less creative kind. Biblical critics attend partially and sp
implications of this. In general, we take it seriously as
that we are dealing with second and third generati
redactions of a text, where we cease to ask what the tex
instead how it was read. But when we are handling th
tion—the ipsissima verba of the first author, or the
generation that first told a story or sang a psalm—t
reconstructed first stage in the text's growth as som
creatively composed, something with an original author
The secondary literature on both Testaments and on
Eastern literature is full of the suggestion that second-ge
transmitters did not see authorship as we do (often thi
exonerating them from charges of plagiarism and false a
first authors of biblical texts tend to be treated much more as authors in the
modern sense. But this will not do. There was not in fact a single golden age,
in which there were real authors in the modern sense, followed by a long
secondary period of copyists. As in the Middle Ages, so in the days when our
biblical texts were being written, the mentality which took no interest in
originality and treated all words on paper as public property was universal.
There is no reason to suppose that the authors of the little pieces of original
bedrock that we dig down to with such labour in the Pentateuch or the
prophets had a different view of their own ipsissima verba than of anything
else that was written or recorded for posterity. The picture one gets from
much that is written on the Bible is that then as now there were original
creative authors who had their own literary identity, but that they existed as
islands in a scribal sea that overwhelmed their work once it had been extant
for a generation. But the islands may well be figments of an anachronistic
modern understanding of literature. The original authors were, perhaps,
part of the scribal sea themselves, sharing the same view of authorship as
those who anonymously handed down and embellished what they had
written.

Let me make it clear that I am not saying we are necessarily wrong to

detect the presence of creative innovators, even creative geniuses, among the
biblical writers. A writer may hold an understanding of his own role which
quite fails to do justice to his own originality—just as Chaucer can be clearly
seen to have been more creative than he claims to be, living as he did in a
literary culture for which creativity had not been articulated or at least not

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 JOHN BARTON 145

identified as a virtue; or just as Do

hundred years before his time. I a
kind of approach advocated by S
according to which the Old Testam
tradition, and no more can be said about it. I am concerned with the
narrower question of what kinds of meaning it is fruitful or proper to look
for in the biblical text, and am suggesting that, given the historical
possibilities I have presented, it may be anachronistic to look for the
meaning even of'original' Old Testament writers by asking questions about
their intentions, their interests, what was going through their minds, what
insights they wanted to communicate. Sometimes it may be that more
appropriate questions would focus on types of meaning that do not require
an author with intentions to mean them: the kinds of meaning, in fact, that
newer, non-historical styles of criticism concentrate on. Let me develop this
point a little further.

IV

The most obvious case in the Old Testament of texts which either had no
authors, in the ordinary sense, or whose authors were largely reworking
traditional material and writing to a formula, is the Psalms. Andrew Louth,
in his book Discerning the Mystery, rightly identifies the psalter as a problem
for traditional, author-centred historical criticism. He writes:

What is the meaning of these poems that we recite, and continue to recite after
three thousand years or so? Is it what the original writer intended, or what
whoever it was who introduced the psalm into the worship of the Temple
thought, or what? Clearly too restrictive an understanding of the meaning of a
psalm will make nonsense of the recitation of the psalms and deny the basis of
the spiritual experience of generations of Christians ... The tendency of the
historical-critical method has been to concentrate on originality and regard
what is not original as secondary; but if we see here a process of inspired
utterance and reflection on—comment on—inspired utterance within the
tradition, itself regarded as inspired, then we have a more complicated but, I
suggest, truer picture ... The art of understanding is more complicated, and
richer, than an attempt to isolate the earliest fragments and to seek to understand
them in a conjectured 'original' context: we hear the voice and the echoes and
the re-echoes, and it is as we hear that harmony that we come to understanding.6

Even if we could reconstruct a level in the psalter, or identify some

particular psalms which really were the work of a highly original and
creative poet, rather than a highly stylized use of stock forms, that would not
necessarily render the historical question of the author's intention any easier
to resolve. For our putative original psalmist would be most unlikely to have

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 i46 READING THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE

understood his own task as essentially different from

psalmists and psalm-tradents who failed to produce
Most likely he will have fully shared their view of th
craftsmen working to traditional designs; he will h
sense that he was creating original literature to conv
Now it seems to me that our task as historical c
seriously such a writer's perception of his own f
paradoxically, involve us in asking primarily que
immanent features such as motifs, stock themes, and
which give the text a profound meaning that its
probably have been unaware of: we cannot investigat
a sense he had none. To ask about the meaning of suc
to ask what meaning its construction generates,
intention on the poet's part; but a question like this
as belonging to a non-historical mode of criticism! Y
to be the loss of our intuitive sense that in the Psalm
presence of great poetry. If we are to continue to be
properly faced up to the probability that the actual au
no awareness of producing literature in this sense a
adopting an essentially non-historical type of critic
an explanation of the Psalms' literary merit that is l
than in the intentions of the psalmists. We shall ha
Lewis's words, that there can be "poetry without a p
do justice to this unless there can be some understan
ers of historical and non-historical criticism.
Something similar might be said of the book of Job. Historical criticism
has often sought to establish the earliest form of this work, or at least to trace
the various stages in its redaction. In recent years we have seen a much
greater desire to read the book as it stands: to speak of the interests and
intentions of the final redactor, and to deflect attention from the questions of
'Introduction' that traditionally played so large a part in critical study of the
book. In the present context we might want to ask whether both approaches
may not be somewhat misguided. Suppose the book is not, and was not at
any stage in its development, the expression of a particular writer's point of
view, but rather an assemblage (within the framework of a traditional tale,
and in the form of a poetic drama) of a large number of'stock' positions on
the questions of theodicy with which each part of the work deals in some
way or other? Is it not possible that the writer was trying to provide a
complete set—a sort of sampler—of all the arguments in common use on
this theme? If so, then it would no longer be very appropriate to look for the
'original meaning' either of the first author or of the final editor. Job would
not be 'intentional' at all.

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 JOHN BARTON 147

It is not only in the poetic parts of

arise. One of the great achievemen
been to make us see the narrative books of the Old Testament not so much
as evidence for historical events—though they may also be that—but rather
as the work of historiographers who had a message to convey. Classic cases
of this would be the Deuteronomistic Historian as reconstructed by Noth,
and the Yah wist as reconstructed by von Rad. Michael Goulder has raised a
question about these redaction-critical studies, however, which suggests to
me that there is still some unfinished business here. Discussing Noth's
theories about the work of the Deuteronomic Historian, he writes:

The completed D-corpus was never intended to be a literary work, laid by, like
Hilkiah's book of the law, to be found during Temple renovations. It was
intended and used for liturgical proclamation.8

And in a similar vein, speaking of the complex pattern of inner-scriptural

allusion that he believes can be found in Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, he
first rejects the possibility that it is accidental, and then continues:

A second, if remote, possibility might be that the Chronicler was an artist:

seeing the natural parallel between the Kings story and the Pentateuch, he has
elaborated it with the touches we have seen. Such a theory does not impress.
Who wrote, who read works of art in the Jerusalem of 350 B.C.? The
suggestion seems foreign to the Jewish mind, unpractical and pointless.9

One does not need to subscribe to Goulder's own liturgical theory of the
origins of these two narrative works to see that he has put his finger on a real
difficulty in what may be called the consensus view of the redaction of
biblical 'historiography'. The redaction-critical interest in the motives and
intentions of the editors has, in fact, pushed to one side a question that earlier
form- and traditio-historical criticism had paid more attention to: the
question of the intended use of lengthy narrative material in ancient Israel.
Scholars sometimes speak of the D history's having been 'published' during
the Exile: but in what sense published? Even if we do not adopt a theory of
liturgical origins for it, we can scarcely think of it as a literary history for
circulation among the literate élite, or for deposit in a public library. When
we ask what the redactor is trying to convey, what view of Israel's history he
would like his readers to accept, we need to be clear what kind of social
setting we are presupposing. In what contexts in Israel during the exilic age
could one encounter such a work as the D history and be either convinced or
unconvinced by its lines of argument? Form critics have written much about
the Sitz im Leben of the einfache Formen of which much of the Old Testament
is supposed to be composed; but what was the Sitz im Leben of long

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148 READING THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE

narrative works such as Joshua-Kings or Chronic

do not know, and perhaps we should not was
questions; but it is also true that to speak of the inte
the D history tends to imply that we do know, s
literary culture not unlike our own, in which boo
individuals and read by the literate for pleasure o
society in the exilic and post-exilic ages like that?
be on the agenda of Old Testament studies?

II. IS THERE ANY LITERATURE IN THE OLD TESTAMENT?

By reminding ourselves of a number of aspects of

which, in themselves, there would probably be quite
have been able to question some of the claims of
exclusive appropriateness. Old Testament literatu
extent than the literature of medieval England, is tra
anonymous, and making no claims to originality; it
what might be called a creative transcription of an a
his own ideas. This already means that much of it is very
we normally call 'literature'. However, there may be
'literature' is not the most suitable description of th
we define 'literature' much more broadly than is usua
that this equally undermines some more recent tren
which in their eagerness to apply the 'non-historica
developed in modern criticism are tending to argue
methods are not sufficiently sensitive to the 'literary
begin with a summary of an important section of B
his remarks seem to me to apply, mutatis mutandis,

'Literature' in most modern writing compri

poetry + prose + fiction + drama. There is a gene
protests from some literary theorists) to exclude disc
philosophical, and technical writing—from 'liter
miscellaneous corpus of non-fictional prose ... attract
tion either from critics or from literary historians, exc
the study of poems, novels and plays."10 The concept
of literature may be found in the combination of two
idea we may call 'literariness', littérarité. The first of
of language, which might be summed up as follows:
ceases to be merely a tool for the expression of thoug
be so far as possible transparent, and becomes instead
its own right. Iris Murdoch has put this point very cl

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 JOHN BARTON 149

is art, an aspect of art form. It may

it is literature it has an artful int
characteristically elaborate manner
of which it forms a part... A philo
explain exactly what he means and
The second factor in 'literariness' i
says Burrow,

is distinguished from history or philosophy or science as a fictional, or non

affirmative, or non-pragmatic, or hypothetical mode of discourse. It is not
committed, in any ordinary, straightforward fashion, to the truth of the events
which it reports or the ideas which it propounds... Northrop Frye says: "In
literature the standards of outward meaning are secondary, for literary works
do not pretend to describe or assert, and hence are not true, not false, and yet
not tautological either."12

And Burrow quotes the classic statement of this position from Sir Philip
Sidney's Apology for Poetry (1595): "Now for the poet, he nothing affirms,
and therefore never lieth." This second idea is in origin Aristotelian: in the
Poetics we find: "You might put the works of Herodotus into verse, and it
would still be a species of history"—that is, not poetry.
As Burrow shows, this concept of 'literature' is hardly to be found in the
Middle Ages in England. Eloquence does not entail Activity; high style is
rhetoric rather than 'art'; the poet is under no self-denying ordinance which
binds him, as a poet, to refrain from affirming. There are indeed works, such
as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which are plainly literature in our sense,
and where "final moral judgements are uttered, not by their author, but by
Gawain, Bertilak, and the Round Table; and, since their judgements
disagree, the ultimate effect is pleasingly oblique and non-affirmative".13
But there are many other works which clearly observe no convention of
Activity : we find, says Burrow, "sermons in verse, instructions for parish
priests in verse, courtesy books and chronicles in verse, even poems on
alchemy stained with chemicals".14 In practice most of such material is
excluded from what is studied under the heading 'Middle English
Literature'. But there is a great deal of medieval writing that occupies a sort
of middle ground; which we certainly want to claim for 'literature', yet
which has as its aim a direct, rather than an oblique, relation to truth,
especially theological or moral truth. A good example is Pearl, where, says
Burrow, "even the most literary of readers has to recognize ... that one of
the immediate objects of the poem is theological truth".15 An even better
example, if we move outside England, is Dante's Divine Comedy. The
Comedy contains lengthy passage of philosophical and theological exposi

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 150 READING THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE

tion; but its claims to be literature can hardly b

possible, as apparently some sixteenth century
passages in an Aristotelian manner, as imitations
cal argument; to suggest that Dante, in so far as

offers the reader not arguments and ideas but images

the reader, in so far as he is a true reader of p
convinced by arguments but to be delighted by th

But to maintain this for the whole of the Comed

tour de force. It is much more likely that Da
literature was much broader than ours, wanted t
thought were correct, and saw no reason why h
the fictive framework of his poem. The notion th
not available to him: he did not have our idea of
It is what seems to us this unhappy mixing of f
fact, that makes medieval literature difficult for
example from Burrow will serve to sum up the d
discussion of related problems in the study of t

Critics are often excessively eager ... to insist t

philosophical or theological exposition in a me
'dramatically'—as the expression, that is, of the par
the Narrator (a favourite figure) or of some ch
imitation of ideas, of course, does occur, in medie
The long speech in which Chaucer's Troilus argues
tion (IV 958—1078) should certainly be read drama
projection of the hero's distress at the prospect of
even Chaucer can be completely contained withi
however hard critics may try. The Canterbury Tale
tary form) ends with the Parson's Tale and Chaucer
Tale is a treatise on the sacrament of penance. The
will emphasize its appropriateness to its teller,
administered the sacrament, and also its dramatic f
the pilgrims enter the holy city of Canterbury; bu
the Tale into the spectacle of the Canterbury pilgrim
convince the disinterested reader. Followed as it is
Parson's Tale seems to break out of the fictiona
confront the reader directly with the realities of p

II

Once again I do not think it requires much imagination to see that the
student of the Bible faces problems similar to those encountered in the study

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 JOHN BARTON iji

of medieval literature. It is, again

Old Testament that these problem
narrative accounts for considerab
and similar questions cannot fail
There is coming to be a general co
readings of the narrative books, t
them as sources of historical infor
literature, to be studied with the
part this is, of course, a perfectly r
insistence on taking the biblica
nothing more. In part, too, it is a
centred approach of the Albright
their worst moments tended to tr
of historical facts, and who seldom
literature at all. Nevertheless ther
the Bible could in its own way pr
thetexts in question as other met
between ancient and modern con
seen, a highly-wrought narrati
Activity; but this may not have b
than it was for writers of mediev
I doubt if we can say of the writ
"nothing affirms, and therefore
writers of the Old Testament hav
the difference between fact and fic
Narrative' may well have been int
as the author of Tobit, for examp
of writing fiction. Where they di
of the kind of writing appropriate
was not closely correlated with a
'novel-like' characterization and d
recorded in works such as 2 Samu
reveal oneself as a hopeless philist
literary criticism; it is rather, to re
excessively narrowed the range of
causes no serious distortions when
but is less appropriate in an ancie
What goes for the events record
apply to the speeches with which
the Deuteronomistic History we f
of Moses or Solomon or Ahijah, w
fiction, in the sense that they ar

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152 READING THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE

this does not in the least imply that they ar

imitations of what characters in the story might
the most notable feature of such speeches is thei
the complete concord with sentiments expres
speaking in propria persona (as in Judges 2:11—
reader is meant to take them seriously as stateme
merely to entertain them as fictive, 'in charact
surely true a fortiori of divine speeches. As a m
Yahweh is a character in a story told by the De
Priestly Document, the Yahwist's history, or wh
one in ancient times ever saw him in that way, and
that the authors in question meant, in these spe
the reader or hearer a serious and non-fictitious divine address. The omni
science of the narrator, which extends even to what Yahweh said in private
to Moses or to Solomon, is meant by the actual author to be taken at face
value; the 'Narrator', whose distinctness from the author himself is so
essential to most modern literary criticism, does not have this kind of
independent existence for either the readers or the authors of the biblical
histories, I would suggest. Consciously fictive narrative does exist in the Old
Testament and Apocrypha, but hardly in the primary history-works of the
Pentateuch and Former Prophets. All this means that the application of
modern literary techniques to this material is fraught with hazard.

III. CONCLUSIONS

The upshot of the present discussion is nece

towards most theoretical positions about the kind
biblical studies. I have tried to suggest (with
illuminating discussion of medieval literature) t
Testament do not fall easily within our category
hand, they are in most cases anonymous, lack
creative mind, and do not themselves operate wi
meaning' which is so crucial for traditional histor
that biblical critics need to learn from their sec
criticism appropriate to authorless, non-intention
where we can speak of the intentions of the bibli
may well include a desire to communicate facts
way. Not all points of view expressed, not all ev
texts are meant to be taken obliquely, as the ideas or
fiction; for these authors the 'Narrator' is some
who addresses the reader directly and can be ex
grasp both of historical fact and of theological t
traditional kinds of criticism cannot be simply se

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 JOHN BARTON 153

'literary' (synchronic, holistic, o

beginning, I have no intention of q
this question; but I am sure at least
would surely be a greater pragmatis
the disposal of biblical scholarship.
of literary convention, genre, and a
that interest 'literary' critics—trad
suggested, actually become more his
of anachronism in understanding
literary culture from our own. On t
turn of mind need to remember th
tightly-defined thing it is now; in
writing which did not confine itself
and sought to be justified in terms of
think of as 'merely aesthetic' fea
tendency to narrow our vision of w
kinds of criticism, they tend to recast
own image. We cannot clear our min
we approach the Bible, but it c
occasionally clarifying what our pr

REFERENCES

'See especially chapter I. 9 M. D. Goulder, Midrash and Lection in

Matthew
2J. Barton, 'Classifying Biblical (London, 1974), 218-9.
Criticism',
JSOT 29 (1984), 19-35- See also
10 Burrow, my
op. cit., 12.
11 In, Men ofin
Reading the Old Testament: Method Ideas: Some Creators of Contem
Bibli
cal Study (London, 1984). porary Philosophy (London, 1978), 265.
3Burrow, op. cit., 47. (This volume contains transcripts of series
4Ibid., 29. of television interviews, undft the same
'Ibid., 34. title, conducted by Brian Magee with
6 A. Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay various leading philosophers.) See also
on the Nature of Theology (Oxford, 1983), Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Intro
108. duction (Oxford, 1983), i—16.
7E. M. W. Tillyard and C. S. Lewis, The 12 Burrow, op. cit., 13.
Personal Heresy: A Controversy (London, 13 Ibid., 18.
1939), 2nd edition 1965, 16. 14 Ibid., 19.
8M. D. Goulder, The Evangelists' Calendar: 15 Ibid., 21.
A Lectionary Explanation of the Development 16 Ibid., 21-22.
of Scripture (London, 1978), 114. 17 Ibid., 22-23.

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