2005-03-09 Massive, insightful and a little daring

It's a major task "analysing" a book with so many variations and long historical scope. Limiting the parameters to "literary" aspects is hardly a pruning - even when historical elements are essentially stripped away. Alter and Kermode saved themselves some of the labour by farming out much of the analysis required for this job. The result is a collection of essays readable only in selected bits. The variety of approaches will perplex the reader experienced in biblical analysis. The newcomer, however, who perseveres with patience and a willingness to consult other resources, will find the full scope of the collection a worthwhile investment.

Selecting authors for these essays must have been daunting. They should each be familiar with the books and with the essentials of literary criticism. It's said that "anyone can be a critic", but approaching books held in such awe and reverence by large segments of the population takes a certain level of finesse. Most of these authors exhibit that capability. Alter and Kermode note that they don't demand "uniformity of style" in the entries, but the approach is uniformly constrained, but not narrow. The essays are not buried in arcane literary movements, such as structuralism, feminism or post-modernism, which were prevalent when this book was published. Alter and Kermode, in their introductory essays, acknowledge these movements, but they and most of the authors return to more a classical framework in their analyses. This approach is likely motivated by the use of the King James Version, with which most of their readers have at least passing familiarity.

The KJV foundation, however, restricts much of the appeal of this collection to Protestant Christianity. Anything else would be chaotic, but the reader may find a few authors use circular reasoning as they attempt to retrieve literary elements. It becomes "what is said, was said". The KJV, at a midpoint between biblical events and modern times, presents an atmosphere out of joint with the subjects dealt with. The editors caution the reader about this, but once past their introductory comments the individual authors strive, sometimes successfully, to place occurrences in a proper frame of reference. Omitting the historical environment tends to make the literary analyses fragile and incomplete. It limits "literary" aspects to what the modern reader can understand and utterly omits what a reader of the times might perceive. How would people of that era have viewed the various stories and the characters they portray?

The editors make a final attempt to preserve the historical framework in a half-dozen general essays that conclude the book. These writings address the issues of assembling the books into a "canon" - the establishment of the books into a voice of authority - biblical poetry and the impact of Greco-Roman writing techniques and use of accepted mythologies in that world. A serious and scholarly collection, the volume provides an excellent foundation for understanding biblical literary aspects. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]