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PARTISAN REVIEW
Who would accept it? I'm not claiming that there is not some
embroidery here and there in the Biblical account, but there must
have been some exodus from Egypt in order to get an acceptance
of the exodus story by the Jews. Yet Jacobson seems to think that
the history of the Jews, especially before the conquest of Canaan,
was made out of whole cloth. Furthermore, why were the Jews so
upset about the conquest of Canaan that they had to create a
covenant myth
to
make it sound just? The Hebrews of the thir–
teenth or twelfth centuries B.C. must have been extraordinarily
gentle and sensitive to do so, hardly the kind of warriors one
would expect-warriors racked by doubts and sensitivities.
These two books reflect the revived apocalyptic spirit of our
age. The creation of the atom bomb, as Professor Vann Wood–
ward pointed out some thirty years ago, has changed the attitude
of most of our population towards the long apocalyptic tradition
found in the Bible, a tradition largely eclipsed in the eighteenth,
nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. No longer can it be ig–
nored. Both Frye and Jacobson take the apocalyptic tradition
seriously, and although they consider it as myth rather than real–
ity, they both give a high and important place to myth.
Alter's
The Art of Biblical Narrative
is a more academic
book than the other two, but, like them, an important contribu–
tion to biblical and literary studies. Its subject is the narrative
technique of the story parts of the Old Testament.
It
is written by a
\'
man who has been interested in narrative for a long time. Al-
though not a structuralist or poststructuralist theorist, Alter has
here written the best introduction
to
the narrative technique of the
Bible in English. It is, however, more than that; it is also a con–
tribution to the interpretation of the narrative parts of the Bible
and it helps
to
explain some of the cruces and difficulties of the
Bible. Literary analysis has been little used by professional bibli-
cal scholars.
Although Alter states in his preface that the purpose of his
literary analysis is to illustrate general principles and not to pro–
vide a commentary on particular passages, nonetheless he has
provided us with a number of perceptive analyses of parts of the
Bible.
These three books are all valuable in their different ways, but
are alike in taking seriously their task and in bringing to it origi–
nality, style and a richness of perception. They presage, one hopes,
