Biographical Patterns in Biblical Narrative - by Blenkinsopp

8/12/2019 Biographical Patterns in Biblical Narrative - by Blenkinsopp

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Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 20 (1981)

the ancient Near East will recall the story of Sinuhe from theMiddle Kingdom and Wen-Amon's account of his journey from

Egypt t o

Byblos over eight hundred years later / 2 / . Otherinscriptions and narratives of an autobiographical kind whichhave survived from antiquity, like many in our own day, areinformed primarily by an apologetic intent. Here the line runsfrom the self-serving and selective records of royal campaignsand other real or fictitious res gestae - only very few of whichachieve anything like a distinct narrative and autobiographicalquality / 3 / - through memoirs written for a specific and usuallypolemical reason like those of Ezra, Nehemiah and the

contemporary Ion of Chios /4 / , to full-blown autobiographies,also generally polemical, like that of Josephus - perhaps thefirst clear instance of the genre /5/.

Insofar as we are able to reconstruct it, the early history ofbiography reveals rather different intentionalities and lines offorce. We might, in the most general way, define biography asthe account of a person f s life from birth to death. But recordsof human lives are of many different kinds of which the fullydeveloped genre of biography is only one. If we take the broad

view, we can find the essentials of a life epitomized in a nameand a couple of dates on a tombstone, for example. But generally the commemorative instinct, which has always provided apowerful stimulus to the writing of biographies, calls for asomewhat fuller record. We might therefore pass from epitaphsto memorial brasses and stones of which the following, fromSt.Mary's church in Wilton, England, is not untypical:

Edmund the sonn of Edmund Philip aliasSweeper of Burbridge and farrer to the

Earl of Pembroke hoo died the 19 ofJanuary and buried in this place. Anno1677 Aetatis 70.

Here are noted: name, parentage, place of residence, occupation, age, date of death and place of burial; not unimportantdata, but not much to go on if we are interested in the personof this Edmund and the meanings bestowed or imposed on thebiblical span of his life. And while we are looking at suchrudimentary schemata we may as well present the SolomonGrundy whose cycle from birth to death is so comprehensivelyand economically set out in the old nursery rhyme: Solomon


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has been drawn into the sphere of historiography, borrowingfrom the latter its presuppositions and methods. From theliterary-critical viewpoint the failure of the "quest for thehistorical Jesus" exemplifies the failure of the modern genre ofbiography to find its own way of expressing the meaning ofhuman lives. Such an outcome was adumbrated by Aristotlewhere he speaks of the plot or myth of tragedy in the Poetics.He points out that it is inappropriate to propose a person ratherthan an action as subject since the events of a person's life, likethe successive events of history in general, cannot be reducedto a unit. A plot must be a single action, a complete whole

"with all the organic unity of a living creature" (Poetics #23,cf. 8).Whatever we may think of Aristotle's denial of the status of

poiesis to historiography, he at least draws our attention to theneed to juxtapose with or superimpose on some kind of apattern or grid the nuda facta biographica if they are to rendersome kind of meaning. And in fact the earliest examplesidentified by those who have investigated the history of thegenre are never of the historiographical kinds /10/. This is so,

as noted, with the lives and memoirs of Socrates and thePeripatetic biographies which illustrate virtues and vices anddelineate good and bad characters after the ethical teaching ofthe master / l l / . The encomiastic kind (epainoi) likewise, ofwhich the earliest examples are those of the Cypriot kingEvagoras and the Spartan king Agesilaus by Isocrates andXenophon respectively, are modelled on ancient histories of andlamentations for gods and divine men /12/. In connection withthis last point it might also be suggested that the dirge or

panegyric has played its part in the development of the genre.One thinks of the biographical content of Anthony's funeraloration over the dead body of Caesar which, in the originalsources if not in Shakespeare, bears unmistakable traces ofritual and recitation carried out over the dead god of thevegetation /13/. In different ways all of these betray the needto detect structures and patterns of meaning in human lives.

It may be objected at this point that, whatever the patternsof meaning which shape biographical writing and give it itsspecific character, they should be shown to emerge from thedeeds and decisions of the subject; they should therefore not bespoken of as if somehow they exist independently of the


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Blenkinsopp: Biographical Patterns

of those ethicists who have begun to mine biography for theirown purposes /14/ One response would be that such a project

necessarily finds its significance only in a context broader thanthat of the aims and decisions of the subject. Moreover, writinga life necessarily involves one in selection, arrangement andpresentation according to presuppositions, value-judgments andmodels which the writer brings to the task; that here aselsewhere, therefore, there is no such thing as an innocentinterpretation. As for the subject, it is simply not the case thatthe process of making a whole of one's life implies onlyconscious activity and decision. For these have to be seen in

counterpoint to unconscious desires and needs revealed perhapsthrough dreams, a sudden revelation of selfknowledge, theunanticipated tapping of unsuspected sources of energy andpower, abrupt and, at the conscious level, inexplicable changesof direction /15/. The best and deepest life-stories do nothesitate to introduce a sense of fate, destiny or providenceoften pointing in a direction quite different from that alongwhich the protagonist is driven by conscious goals and purposes.One thinks of the way the spell functions in the folktale, the

oracles of deities in the Homeric poems, the ominous dreams ofEnkidu in Gilgamesh, the sense of a divinely willed destiny inthe biblical story of Joseph /16/. The same note can of coursebe present, though it will be often more difficult to detect, inmodern biographies. "No one goes so far," said Cromwell at onepoint of his career, "as he who knows not whither he goes." Andeven Hitler spoke of himself moving with the assurance of asleepwalker.

What we have been suggesting in the previous remarks is that

in its earliest development biography required the use of aparadigm, pattern or grid to bring out the meaning in, or bestowa particular meaning on, the succession of events which providethe raw data of a human life. By extension this would alsoinclude narrative patterns which can be identified in the greatfund of traditional narrative or folktale which, more thananything else, gives shape and significance to the experience ofpeople living in a particular culture. What is decisive for thiskind of narrative is not the personality of an author but the

tradition which shapes the story and perpetuates itself throughthe genre and more specifically through the plot or mythospeculiar to it /17/ Hence the strategy in what follows will be


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with apologies to Hans Frei, biography-like narratives, thestructure or plot of one kind of traditional genre, namely, the

folktale. The intent will not necessarily be to show that suchnarratives have been consciously shaped by or modelled onfolktale structures (which is generally not the case) but to usethe folktale as a heuristic device for bringing to light patternsand configurations not immediately apparent - like finding thehidden animal by coloring numbered sections. Such anexploration is bound to be preliminary, tentative and moresuggestive than conclusive. Traditional narratives offer morethan one model and there is no doubt more than one way of

analyzing folktales. And there is certainly more than one wayof analyzing biblical narratives biographical or otherwise. Butone has to make a start somewhere.

II

First, a word on where we stand. It would be widely agreedthat biblical form critics have paid little attention to the genreof biography. One might reply that this is for the very good

reason that this genre is not found in the Bible. We have alreadyseen that it emerged towards the end of the period of theformation of the Hebrew Bible and in a milieu more congenialto its development. And even where biographical material ofone kind or another appears in the Bible it seems that theinterest is more in making some theological point - for example, demonstrating the power or providence of God - than innarrating the course of a human life. It is therefore hardlysurprising that form criticism, which we must insist is not co

extensive with literary criticism, has to a very large extentneglected the study of biographical or biography-like narrativeas worthy of attention in its own right.

Some attempts have, nevertheless, been made, though in aquite uncoordinated way. Attention has been drawn to whathave been called "ideal biographies" as exemplified in ancientEgyptian funerary inscriptions honoring viziers and other publicfigures. In these texts, it is claimed, personal characterization,which is the staple of modern biography, tends to recede beforecertain standard topoi dealing with title, family background,call to public service or commissioning, vindication in the faceof false changes, and the like. The further claim has been made,


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ation of the public career of such prophetic figures as Moses,Elijah and the Isaian Servant. Even if the attempt to argue adirect relation between the office of vizier and that of prophetin Israel remains unproven, the perception that much of thematerial concerning prophets - and indeed other public figures -is topical and ideal retains its value and reinforces theobservations about biographical patterns made earlier in thispaper /18/.

Attention has also been given to the biographical legendunderstood as a story about the activity, and especiallymiraculous activity, of a holy man or woman. Comparison

between, for example, the Elijah narrative and the Life of SaintAntony the Hermit, reveals common features which allow forthe description of the legend as a distinct genre /19/. The sameterm is also in use by New Testament form critics, though bothDibelius and Bultmann distinguished between legend andmiracle-story, restricting the former to such episodes as thefinding of the young Jesus in the temple and the temptation inthe wilderness /20/. Distinct from the legend is also theaccount of the remarkable career of a holy person or teacher,

such as Philo's Life of Moses, Philostratus' Memoirs ofApollonius and Porphyry's Life of Pythagoras. It is argued thatthis kind of biographical writing stands in the same line ofdevelopment as the aretalogy, originally the recital of thedeeds of a god or goddess (e.g. Isis), and therefore a kind ofrudimentary divine biography. After a long interval contemporary scholarship is once again raising the issue of a possibleconnection between this genre and the gospels /21/.

Summary as it is, this state of the question highlights the

need for a method of analyzing narratives in the Bible whichhave biographical features but which do not readily fall into thecategories determined to date by biblical form criticism. Such alarge part of biblical narrative, from the stories of theancestors and ancestresses to the gospels, deals with humanlives that we risk losing entire levels of meaning if we disregardthe biographical dimension simply because we have not yetelaborated the categories for classifying it. It can perhaps besaid that the Achilles heel of biblical form criticism is its

failure to recognize that morphology must precede typology.Morphological analysis has, by and large, been left to thestructuralists who are emerging fully armed in our discipline as


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study of genres, it seems necessary to hold out for a prioranalysis of the more explicit levels of organization in narrative.

To use a metaphor from archeology, one that might well appealto Lvi-Strauss /22/, a surface exploration is necessary if onlyin order to determine where to dig. One would also expect tofind some relation between what is on the surface and what liesbelow it.

Interest in the folktale dates to the early nineteenth centurywith the publication of the first collection of Haus marchen bythe brothers Grimm. Under the pervasive influence ofRomanticism, they conceived of their task as preserving the

relics of a peasant culture which was already in the process ofdisintegration /23/. Remarkable similarities were soon seen toexist between folktales from widely different areas and variousattempts to explain them were, and continue to be elaborated

/24/ . The first generation of form critics, Gunkel andGressmann in particular /25/, found traces of the folktale hereand there in the Old Testament. The standard Introduction ofEissfeldt which epitomized their labors identifies folktalemotifs such as magical objects and helpful creatures (e.g.

Jonah), narratives which borrow from folktale (e.g. Tobit) andreminiscences of folktales (e.g. the beginning and end of Joband the book of Ruth) /26/. In view of what is to follow it isworthy of note that these conclusions are reached on the basisof the presence or absence in a narrative of motifs which occurin folktales or, in two instances, of a folktale type attestedelsewhere /27/.

The first serious morphological analysis of the folktale wasthat of Vladimir Propp, a member of the Russian Formalist

School /28/. Despite criticism, especially from the Frenchstructuralists (who nevertheless took some of their mostimportant cues from Propp's work) /29/, it remains the essentialstarting point for further investigation. Propp assumed that bymeans of a comparative study of a large enough number offolktales it should be possible to distinguish between constantsand variables and thus arrive at the essential characteristics ofthis kind of narrative. Concentrating on the internal organization of the folktale, he began by breaking down each sampleinto its smallest narrative units. This unit was taken to be not amotif or theme but what he called a function, namely, an act ofa character defined from the point of view of its significance


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independent of how or by whom they are performed; the numberof functions in a folktale is limited; the sequence of functions isalways identical. On this basis he concluded that all folktalesare of identical type with respect to structure. Building on ananalysis of his sample material - a hundred Russian folktales -he drew up an outline or grid of thirty-one functions. Not allare present in all samples but those that are present alwaysoccur in the same sequence.

Rather than commenting in detail on Propp's tabulation -which is quite well known - it may serve our purpose better tostate the "message" of the folktale according to the structure

which emerges from Propp's linear and syntagmatic analysis.The initial perspective is that of the protagonist as victim orsufferer. It begins with the acknowledgement of evil expressedas absence (I) /30/. The victim falls under the power of evilfollowing on violation of an interdiction (II-III), an act whichimplies refusal to acknowledge the limits of freedom. Thiscomes about through deception (IV) which generally involvesself-deception or complicity (V-VII), which in its turn bringsabout a lack (Villa), often through the casting of a spell which

blinds the victim to the true situation. For this situation(alienation, loss, exile) to be reversed, the evil must be acknowledged and some form of mediation sought (IX). Invariably a

journey must be undertaken, either by the victim himself or bya donative hero on his behalf, away from the familiar (familial)everyday world (XI). Tests, interrogations, ordeals must befaced as the journeyer meets hostile, or only apparently hostile,powers (XII-XIII). Also necessary is a magical agent -supernatural help, a miracle, something analogous to grace in

the Christian sense (XIV). With such help the seeker arrives atthe scene of the desired object or in the presence of the desiredperson (XV), but never without having to encounter andovercome the initial evil or villainy (XVI-XVIII). Thus the evil isremoved (XIX) - one returns to life, one is set free, the evilspell drops away - and it is possible at last to return (XX),though this too can be a hazardous undertaking (XXI-XXII). Thestory-line can end here, though it often continues with thearrival of the protagonist incognito (XXIII), confrontation with

false claims and the need to establish identity by undergoingtests (XXIV-XXVI), exposure of the false hero (XXVII-XXVIII),transformation (e g putting on of new clothes) punishment of


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valid for all folktales, or that it reveals the fundamentalorganization of traditional narrative rather than one of several,

than it is to demonstrate the existence of paradigms accordingto which the raw data of human lives can be structured. Thepoint may emerge more clearly if we compare Propp'sconclusions with the analysis of drama and narrative (we mightsupply the word fiction to cover both) in Aristotle's Poetics.Aristotle affirms the primacy of plot (mythos) over character(ethos), he insists that the plot be a unit comparable to anorganism in which the parts function by virtue of the whole,that it have a beginning, a middle and an end, that it move

through a peripateia (Propp's complication) to a dnouement orresolution. The protagonist must be like us (homoios) if we areto experience the purging of the emotions and recognize ourown history in what we see or read. The action, finally, istriggered by a fatal error (hamartia) of the hero, correspondingto Propp's violation of interdiction and complicity with evil.The comparison could be developed further, and would at leastsuggest that Propp is not too far off the mark and that histabulation is probably transferable to other narrative genres,e.g., myth, epic, novel, comic strip.

How, to come to the point, may this formalist analysis serveas a model or grid for the decoding of biblical narrative withbiographical features? Since to be cautious is to be on the sideof the angels, let us begin by saying that it is one essay ofanalysis of one traditional genre, indeed, of one set of samplesof one genre. It is also an analysis along one axis of a narrative,that of plot, which according to the Poetics is only one of sixcomponents of fiction /31/. Further, it is an analysis of oneplane, that of the narrative syntax of the folktale. On the otherhand, it holds out the possibility of a serious rather thanhit-or-miss analysis by taking seriously the narrative structure,while at the same time remaining open to, and indeed inviting,other forms of analysis, e.g., cross-cultural, depth-psychological and theological. It should not be used as a tool foridentifying folktales in the Bible (though if Propp is right itcould function in that way) but as a means of displayingmeaning-conferring patterns in biography-like narrative andtherefore, by implication, making a statement about theconditions necessary for a human life to be lived meaningfully.

At this point one would be expected to go on to offer


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into their several "moves" /32/, transposition into a kind ofalgebra facilitating classification, diagrams laying out the

temporal and spatial axes of the narrative, and so on. Sincemore pressing temporal and spatial restrictions make thisimpracticable for the moment, it is proposed to make apreliminary survey of two examples: the first, we might say,from the periphery of the biblical story, the second from itsmainstream.

Ill

The story of Tobit may be summarized as follows. Tobit, ahighly placed, wealthy and devout Jew, married to Anne bywhom he had a son named Tobias, lived in Nineveh underAssyrian rule. His piety led him to ignore a royal edictprohibiting the burial of executed Jews which, being reported tothe king, resulted in the confiscation of his property and thethreat of execution. On the accession of a new king, however,he was reinstated through the good off ices of his nephew (noneother than the ubiquitous Ahiqar) who had been appointed chief

administrator of the kingdom. During a festal meal celebratinghis reinstatement, his son, who had left the house to bring insome paupers to share their meal, found outside a Jewish corpsewhich Tobit buried that evening. The ensuing state of ritualimpurity obliging him to sleep outside that night, he was blindedby bird droppings which once again reduced him to povertyalleviated only by his wife's meager earnings.

About the same time in distant Ecbatana his niece Sarah washaving her own problems. Promised seven times in marriage,

her prospective husbands had all been killed by the demonAsmodeus, suspicion of multiple homicide naturally resting onthe bride-to-be. About that time Tobit remembered that he haddeposited a large sum of money with a relative in Media, notfar from Ecbatana. He therefore sent Tobias to recover it afterhiring an escort who identified himself as one Azarias but inreality was the angel Raphael. The two set off accompanied bythe father's blessing and the mother's tears. On arriving at theTigris a large fish leaped from the water to devour Tobias butthe latter, guided by his companion, caught it and excised itsheart, liver and gall for future use. After arriving at the houseof Sarah's parents it was agreed that Tobias should marry Sarah;


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approached, he routed the demon by using the fish's heart andliver as instructed by Raphael, and the spouses consummated

their union while the bride's father was engaged in digging theeighth grave outside. After Raphael had got the money forTobias, the travellers returned with Sarah to Nineveh. By againfollowing instructions Tobias cured his father's blindness withthe fish's gall , Raphael revealed his true identity anddisappeared accompanied by a psalm of praise from Tobit. Tobiteventual ly died at the r ipe age of 158 whi le Tobias and hisfa mi ly , warned of the fu tu re destruc tion of Nineveh, set tled inEcbatana where Tobias died at the almost equally ripe age of127.

If we gently lay out this little story on Propp's grid we find arelatively high degree of overlap with twenty-one out ofthirty-one functions attested. With one exception (XVII, thebranding of the hero) the missing functions are all either in thePreparatory Section (there is no Abstention, Reconnaissance,Trickery and Complicity) or in the new complication at the end,following on the Return (XX). It will then be seen that the mostcharacteristically folktale elements are the mediation ofRaphael and the use of a magical agent. The central complication occasioned by the double lack - Tobit's situation atNineveh and Sarah's at Ecbatana - is present in its entirety. Thestructure calls for synchronicity between the events in thesetwo places, with the double villainy/lack elegantly overcome/liquidated by means of a dangerous journey and return (nostos).But since the dramatis personae are, respectively, Tobit andSarah, the question arises as to the hero of the narrative.Structurally it has to be Tobias but, as in many Jewish tales, itis difficult to disengage the protagonist from the kinship group.

These are only some of the more salient points brieflysketched out from what would constitute, in effect, a differentkind of commentary on the book. The gain would not be merelythat of being in a better position to call in question currentclassification of the narrative as a moralistic tale or piousNovelle, based on arguments or procedures which are far toodesultory to inspire confidence /33/. It would also enable us tonote ways in which this structure is homologous with those ofother narratives in the Bible, and indeed with the narrative-structure of the Bible as a whole. We might then be in a position to ask whether a particular pattern according to which


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other example.The story of Jacob in Genesis, as noted earlier, is much more

in the mainstream of the biblical narrative, a mainstream fedby many tributaries deepening and widening as it flows along.The fact that this main body of narrative has been so muchworked over, and that it is cumulative in the sense that eachsegment has to fit into an already established context andpattern /34/, creates severe problems for a structural analysisof any kind /35/ . Taken in its entirety, the life-story of Jacobcovers about half of Genesis (25:19-50:14); but the fact that agood part of it deals with his children reinforces a suggestion

made earlier about the importance of the kinship group. This ofcourse explains why, since Gunkel, the designation saga hasbeen generally used of these stories of the ancestors andancestresses of the people. Even in the central peripateia ofJacob's life, recording his dealings with his brother Esau and hisuncle Laban (25:19-35:39), there occur sections in which he iseither not mentioned at all (26) or plays a subsidiary role (34). Itis hardly surprising, therefore, if results are not as encouragingas with Tobit, despite the presence of numerous folktale-motifs

/36/ . More specifically, the Initial Situation as tabulated byPropp is almost exactly replicated: childlessness, prayer for thebirth of a son, extraordinary conception and birth, oracularpredictions, description of the future hero and anti-hero,argument of brothers over primacy /37/. The Preparatory Section, however, in which the action is set in motion by violationof an interdiction, is not attested. The complication appears toarise directly out of the protagonist's own duplicity. It is he,prompted by the ever-present mother, who deceives his brotherand the ostensibly dying old father, and it is this deceptionwhich brings on the twenty-year exile.

Before we succumb to the temptation of either giving up orof stretching out the narrative by main force on Propp's grid,let us back off a little and look at some of the correspondenceswithin the story which help to shape it. At birth Jacob is givena name, "Heel-gripper," on account of the circumstances,probably unique in the history of obstetrics, under which he sawthe light of day /38/. Many years later, as he is on his way homeafter the long exile, he will be given a new name, "Wrestlerwith God" (Israel), after the encounter with the mysterious anddangerous assailant at the Jabbok ford (25:26; 32:28). Even


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many such stories since childhood we know that this will indeedhappen, but we suspect that it must be allowed to happen in its

own time. But the mother-and-son team is determined to makeit happen, and it will take a great deal of pain and absencebefore it happens in the way it was meant to happen, afterstrife and reconciliation. Then there is the departure for a farland, marked by the strange dream-vision at Bethel, and thereturn, also marked by visions and extraordinary happeningswhich serve to reveal the depth-dimension of the story. Inbetween there is the twenty-year exile during which Laban, whois assigned the role of Donor among Propp's dramatis personae,

is the occasion of Jacob's servitude, suffering and deception,even achieving the well-nigh impossible feat of tricking himinto marrying the wrong woman. Then there is the paradox thatJacob can marry only endogamously (encumbent also on Esaubut neglected by him) by travelling to a distant land and, let usadd, away from the mother. Hence it is only after all but one ofhis sons and his only daughter are born - in a cloud ofetiological puns - that he is ready to start back home (30:25).

It would seem, then, that originally quite distinct blocks oftraditional and probably oral narrative, dealing with Jacob'srelations with Esau and Laban - perhaps also with distinctCisjordanian and Transjordanian Jacobs /39/ - have been manipulated to exhibit a pattern comparable to the folk tale gridorganized around the poles of lack and liquidation of lack, journey away from the familiar world and return. The sequence:Jacob-Esau, Jacob-Laban, Jacob-Esau implies that it is thesibling rivalry which generates the plot, with the necessity forendogamous marriage as a related but subordinate issue. Thecentral peripaty can then be identified as the sudden andunanticipated struggle with the mysterious assailant at thedangerous waters (32:22-32) which decides in advance theoutcome of the reunion with Esau, and from which Jacobemerges marked for life and bearing a new name. This at leastwould provide a provisional basis for "decoding" and tabulatingthe entire story with its many subordinate functions.

IV

It will, I hope, be obvious that what is being attempted hereis no more than a rehearsal of one type of analysis which takes


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particularly in evidence in the Bible but on account of the factthat its plot is paradigmatic and remarkably uniform and its

dramatis personae are typical and representational rather thanrealistic. By any reckoning, the Bible contains much traditionalliterature orally transmitted as was the folktale. Moreover itsleading characters almost invariably have a representationalfunction, a characteristic much in evidence in the Jacob storybut apparent elsewhere (e.g. Adam, the Servant, Jesus). Itmight also be argued that the shaping of the individuallife-stories in the Bible tends to conform to the structure of thebiblical story taken a s a whole, whether we read it as the story

of Adam or of Israel to which, for at least the Christian, thelife-story of Jesus belongs. Northrop Frye has rightly takenbiblical scholars to task for their failure to highlight and clarifythe shape of the biblical story as a whole. In speaking of it as adefinitive myth with a single archetypal structure he hasfocussed on certain structural elements - subjugation to andovercoming of evil, exile and return - entirely consonant withPropp's analysis of the folktale. Also interesting in this respectis his point that it is the myth or plot of the biblical story whichconveys the power to shape the life of the reader therebybestowing on the narrative its canonical character /40/.

To repeat, we are not trying to persuade anyone that Propphas provided us with a perfect instrument / 4 1 / or that othertypes of analysis of biographical material compare unfavorablywith it. We would simply like to show that it can serve to bringout the biographical element in biblical narrative as a wholeand exhibit some of the more important ways in which it isorganized. And it goes without saying that at this stage, withgenuine literary and especially morphological analysis of biblical material still in its infancy, any effort is bound to betentative.

Without attempting to explain the remarkable uniformity ofplot which Propp has shown to be characteristic of folktales, itis possible to detect the operation of certain psychologicaluniversals and, at the same time, given the fact that thefolktale is a cultural product, certain analogies with othercultural phenomena. As Propp and others have noted /42/, thetriadic structure of initiation rites - separation, liminality,incorporation - is replicated in the folktale with its passagefrom the familiar world and eventual reincorporation into a


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tiny etc. /43/. It is an intriguing suggestion that the popularityof the folktale may have something to do with the hearer

experiencing a sort of initiation, as it were at second remove /44/ . It is at any rate true to our experience to affirm that suchinitiation plots remain active in the psyche where they continueto transmit their message /45/. Given the role of memory, allexperience has a narrative quality, both at the conscious leveland in the unconscious where, as Freud has led us to believe,the re-enactment of archaic mythic plots (Oedipus, Elektra)goes on apace and is detected by a kind of analysis entirelycomparable to the literary analysis of which we have been

speaking. There is, to be sure, much in the Bible which is notnarrative and there is in the narrative, as many still believe, alevel of significance which cannot be expressed withoutremainder in terms of psychological realities. But narrative isthe heart of the matter, and much of it consists in the telling oflife-stories the interpretation of which, to date ratherneglected, has an important contribution to make.

NOTES1 R. Scholes and R. Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative(New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp.73-81. Use of theterm "confessions" for certain first person passages in Jeremiahis an implicit acknowledgement of Augustine's debt to biblicalsources.2 J.B. Pritchard (ed.), Ancient Near Eastern TextsRelating to the Old Testament (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1955 ), pp.18-22, 25-29.3 On the autobiographical inscription see S. Mowinckel,"Die vorderasiatischen Knigs- und Frsteninschriften," Euchar-isterion H. Gunkel (1923), pp.278-322; W.Baumgartner, Orientalische Literaturzeitung 54 (1924), pp.313-7; H.G. Gterbock,Zeitschrift fr Assyriologie 8 (1934), pp.1-91; 10 (1938), pp.45-149; H. Gese, Zeitschrift fr Theologie und Kirche 55 (1958),pp.127-45. The inscription of king Idrimi of the Syrian Kingdomof Alalakh (J.B. Pritchard, pp.557-8) is one of the fewautobiographical statements of this kind which has any literaryinterest.4 A. Momigliano, The Development of Greek Biography


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6 Momigliano, p.46.7 apomnemoneumata, Apol. I, 66, 3.

8 See the remarks of C.W. Votaw, The Gospels and Con-temporary Biographies in the Greco Roman World (Philadelphia:Fortress Press, 1970), pp.30 62 (first published in 1915).9 Northrop Frye's "archetypal criticism' envisages theentire range of literature as "displaced mythology" in the sensethat myth is taken to account for and reveal the basicstructural principles of literature. In addition to the expositionof this thesis passim in Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1964), pp.37 57, see his Fables of

Identity (New York: Harcourt, Brace


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the judgment of Solomon (1 Kings 3:16-28) seems to derive froma folktale of Indian origin.

28 V. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (Austin and London:University of Texas Press, 1968 z).29 C.Lvi-Strauss, "L'Analyse morphologique des contesrusses," International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and PoeticsIII (1960), pp.141-3; "La Structure et la Forme: Reflexions sur unouvrage de Vladimir Propp," Cahiers de l'Institut des SciencesEconomiques appliques 99 (1960), pp.3-36.30 This first function (Absentation) can also include old ageand death of parents; Propp, Morphology, p.26.

31 The most important being mythos (plot) and ethos(character); Poetics 6:5.32 A "move" (xody) is a complete series of functions fromthe beginning of the complication to its resolution; a new movebegins with a new villainy, hence functions I-XXII (down to therescue of the hero from pursuit) really constitute one move andXXIII-XXXIII another.33 E.g. J. Alberto Soggin, Introduction to the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), pp.431-2.

34 See the remarks of James Barr, "Story and History inBiblical Theology," Journal of Religion 56 (1976), pp.1-17.35 On the ambiguity of Lvi-Strauss' position vis--visheavily edited ancient Greek and Old Testament myths see G.S.Kirk, Myth. Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and OtherCultures (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of CaliforniaPress, 1970), pp.49-50.36 E.g. the barren mother-to-be, the ascendancy of theyounger son, deathbed blessings, fateful meeting at a well,

serving time for a woman, attack of a demonic agent at adangerous water-crossing, the spirit which must leave beforedawn (cf. the ghost of Hamlet's father, Dracula).37 Propp, Morphology, pp.119-120.38 Stephen Crites gives him this name in a genial paperentitled "Angels we have heard" in James B. Wiggins (ed.),Religion as Story (New York: Harper


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Alexander Greimas, will prove more enlightening when appliedto biblical narrative; see A.J. Greimas, Du Sens (Paris: Seuil,1970) and Smantique structurale (Paris: Larousse, 1966).42 Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, pp.106-7, 115; M.Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963),pp.195-202.43 A. van Gennup, The Rites of Passage (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1960); M. Eliade, Rites and Symbolsof Initiation (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965); V. Turner,The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-structure (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1969).

44 As suggested by Norman J. Girardot, "Initiation andMeaning in the Tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,"Journal of American Folklore 90 (1977).45 Eliade, Myth and Reality, pp.201-2.


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Biographical Patterns in Biblical Narrative - by Blenkinsopp

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