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PDF FormatMoreover, the focus on the deed as the most significant component of reality means that even deeds in the Bible are not described in depth, but are related in the most concise manner possible. In the example above, the tight economy of the biblical Hebrew enables the narrator to compress into a single Hebrew word (e.g., “and he married her”—vayikaheha) entire complex sets of action which, if adapted to film, would occupy many minutes on screen. Years upon years, entire lifetimes of some of the characters, are distilled into ten terse verses. There is sufficient dramatic material here to fill a series of tragedies in the style of Aeschylus’ Orestia, or a thick socio-psychological novel. The biblical narrator, however, transmits only what he sees as most important: What happened, and what happened as a result of what happened.
There is no major character in Homer—and, following him, in all of Western literature—whose physical or psychological qualities are not at least minimally described, regardless of whether the description is pertinent to the plot or merely fulfills the author’s sense of obligation to the norms of his craft. In the Bible, on the other hand, there is almost no direct description of the leading figures. The actions of a biblical figure are his description; the character and his deeds are one and the same.35
Even what little description the Bible supplies is presented as a function of the plot, explaining the actions that are undertaken. If we are told that Esau is hairy, that Goliath is a giant, that Samson has long hair or that Bathsheba is beautiful, this is not description for its own sake, but rather gives the reader the minimum information needed to understand the course of events—Esau’s hairiness is a critical element in Rebecca’s deception of Isaac, Goliath’s stature puts David’s cunning and bravery in context, Samson’s hair is central to Delilah’s mischief and his own downfall, and Bathsheba’s beauty arouses David’s passion. These minimal descriptions say little and suggest much, providing not just mood but meaning to the story. The narrator bothers to mention them only insofar as they contribute to the flow of events.36
The Hebrew poetics of action as presented in the Bible is, therefore, anti-naturalist in essence. Naturalism is pagan. As the term implies, naturalism conceives of reality as “nature,” not as history. If reality is “nature,” then it is something to be described, not narrated. “The nature of things” merits a plastic description in naturalist writing; “human nature” is similarly portrayed in psychological terms.37 The presentation of naturalistic reality, the “mimesis” to which Western fiction aspires, translates into a superficial, sensual presentation of reality, with its sights, sounds, tastes, smells and texture. This type of writing is absent from the Bible.
Even Aristotle, who defines the narrative-dramatic mimesis as the representation of action, and not of static objects or character, ultimately adopts a naturalistic perspective; in his view, the purpose of the narrative mimesis is “to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e., what is possible as being probable or necessary.”38 In other words, the final object of mimesis, for Aristotle, is not some event, but the law of nature that dictates “what is possible as being probable or necessary.” The author of a tragedy is not expected to imitate the details of nature, but, according to Aristotle, he is expected to imitate the principles inherent in nature. Although this relates primarily to the essence rather than to details, its motive is no different from that of the naturalist: Representation of nature as it is. “Hence, poetry [that is, tragedy],” Aristotle writes, “is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”39
The Bible, according to this definition, contains only such “singulars,” unique subjects and events from which no general rule may be derived. On the contrary, many of the events depicted in the Bible not only are not “necessary” in terms of the laws of nature, they are improbable in the extreme. The difference between the Greek ethos, which is philosophical, scientific and naturalistic, and the Hebrew ethos, which is narrative, historical and moral, is acutely evident in the dictum of Aristotle. The anti-naturalist poetics of the Bible cannot, therefore, be seen merely as an artistic limitation in comparison to the descriptive freedom adopted by Western literature beginning with Homer—but rather as an artistic decision that expresses the Hebrew worldview.40
This unique worldview, whose poetics is realized first and foremost in the biblical narrative, continued to set the tone of Hebrew literature for centuries after the Bible was sealed.
VII
The Bible is not a “book.” It is an anthology, a collection of thirty-five different books that were edited and canonized.41 The questions as to which books were to be included and how they would be organized were answered at a certain point in history, in accordance with ideological, political and institutional considerations. The Bible does not contain an exhaustive collection of all the early Hebrew literature, nor even of that which was available when the Bible was canonized. The Bible is a collection of the works that were considered the very best. By force of its being an anthology, the Bible encourages the continuation of Hebrew literary creativity in light of the poetics that is realized in it. While its very canonization necessarily draws to a close a certain literary era, it does so in a way that does not bring Hebrew literary creativity to an end, but, on the contrary, encourages the Jewish people to continue producing Hebrew literature in accordance with its underlying worldview.
Precisely for this reason, it is impossible to accept the “neo-biblical” tendency to dismiss everything that was written after the Bible as “exilic” and therefore irrelevant.42 This position does an injustice not only to post-biblical Hebrew literature, but also to the Bible itself, since it misses the point of the canon as a guide for subsequent authors. Scripture is the point of departure for the development of the Hebrew prose that followed it. For thousands of years, Judaism expressed the main elements of its life and belief in narrative prose. It did so in the Talmud, in popular folktales and in Kabalistic and Hasidic stories. From the Bible on, Judaism held fast to its underlying poetic principles, which set it apart from the world’s other dominant literary genres and set the tone for its own development.
I have defined Hebrew literature as historical, national, deed-based narrative prose, and we have seen the realization of its poetic foundations in the Bible. While the poetics employed in later rabbinic legends, or agadot, differs markedly from that of the Bible, the former nonetheless employ the same basic approach. An example from the Talmud suffices to make the point:
It was told of Nahum of Gamzu that he was blind in both his eyes, his two hands and his two legs were amputated, his entire body was covered with boils, and he would lie in a rickety house, with the legs of his bed standing in bowls of water to prevent ants from crawling on him. It happened that his students decided to remove the bed [i.e., with him on it] and then clear the belongings out of the house. He said to them, “My children, first clear out the belongings, and then take my bed, for you can be sure that so long as I am in the house, it will not collapse.” They cleared out the belongings and then removed his bed, and the house collapsed. His students said to him, “Master, since you are perfectly righteous, why has all this befallen you?” He replied to them, “My children, I have brought all this upon myself. Once I was journeying on the road, to the house of my father-in-law, and I had with me three asses, one laden with food, another with drink, and a third with all manner of delicacies. A poor man came, stopped me on the road, and said to me: ‘Master, give me something to eat.’ I said to him: ‘Wait until I have unloaded something from this ass.’ Before I had managed to unload anything from the ass, he died. I went and fell upon him and said: ‘May my eyes that had no pity on your eyes become blind; may my hands that had no pity upon your hands be cut off; may my legs that had no pity upon your legs be amputated.’ My mind was not put to rest until I added, ‘May my entire body be covered with boils.’“ They said to him: “Woe unto us to see you in such a state.” He answered them: “Woe unto me if you did not see me in such a state.”43
Instead of expressing their views in a theoretical or conceptual fashion, the rabbis spoke through stories. The story of the curse that Nahum of Gamzu inflicted on himself does not present an “argument,” for why teach by means of a story that which can be presented as an explicit thesis? Moreover, even within the story, when Nahum’s pupils pose a question that invites a theoretical answer, the master responds with another story, without theoretical explanations. Not that the story does not possess meaningful content. One can, of course, learn many “lessons” from it, about sympathy for others, coping with suffering, respect for teachers or the magical power of a curse; but we would search in vain in this tale, or in the many talmudic legends like it, for the direct, methodical formulation of the beliefs and opinions of the Sages. They left philosophy for the Greeks, and for Hellenists such as Philo. Instead of systematic doctrine, we find only stories.
