haggholm | The weirdness of biblical redaction (Reply)

Suppose you’re a modern-day Grimm, utterly in love with folklore—perhaps traditions you grew up with; perhaps traditions you fell in love with because they are new and strange to you in a place you moved to as an adult. As you talk to people in the rural area about old stories, you come across a truly great one—perhaps it involves moose and moonshine—which you hear about from two old codgers who heard it from their respective grandfathers.

You love it; it’s brilliant; you immediately decide to write it down and publish it (whether as a short story or novella or academic treatise on folklore, you may decide)…but you’ve got a bit of a problem: You have two sources for your story, but they don’t quite agree. Each contains details missing from the other; and, worse, there are points on which the stories are incompatible, or flatly disagree.

How will you present these two stories, given their differences? I can think of a number of approaches, most of which I’ve seen in actual use. For example:

You might simply give both versions. I don’t think that needs much explanation: You can publish one story after the other.

Or, since they’re mostly the same story, you might annotate differences by giving one story as the main text and indicating differences in footnotes, endnotes, or marginal notes.

If you want the story to flow better and make it more of a narrative than an academic read—basically, if you want to be the final product to be a single, uninterrupted narrative—perhaps you’d rather supplement one version with the other by basically telling one version from beginning to end, but taking elements from the other that the first was missing. In this case, when the stories disagree, you might either prefer one over the other, or you might take a more archival view of things and want to preserve both versions, thus including anecdotes from the secondary story even when they introduce tension or contradictions.

You might take this one step further and harmonise the stories. In this case, you’d create your final version by including elements of both stories but making sure to explain away any tensions and reconcile any contradictions.

What you probably wouldn’t do—at least I wouldn’t—is to chrologically interleave the narratives. This peculiar approach works as if you took the first story and cut it up into short chunks—paragraphs or sometimes even sentences—and annotated them each with its chronological position in the story; then, did the same with the second version of the story; and finally, included all the pieces of both versions by taking them in strict chronological order, even if that sometimes means interleaving the stories: A/B/B/B/A/B/A/A/… And if you did this, surely you would at least make sure not to include all the many times that both stories agree, repeating the same details twice.

But if you were a biblical redactor, this is precisely what you might decide to do. In fact, it is what the writers who produced the final biblical text did with a number of well-known and important stories. When Joseph is sold into slavery in Egypt, that’s two stories, or two versions of one story; in each case the basic gist is that he’s betrayed by his brothers, except that one plans to save him, but he is sold into slavery in Egypt before he can be thus saved; but the two versions disagree on why his brothers hated him, which brother wanted to spare him, or by whom he was sold. The story simply tells you that it was Reuben who decided to save him and also that it was Judah, and the editor does not appear to have done anything to either resolve or explain the contradiction: the text is a mess—the product of chronological interleaving. And the same is true of several other stories: for example, the Flood myth famously doesn’t make sense, and David’s introduction to Saul and fight with Goliath has similar doublets and contradictions (including the trivial but striking fact that David kills Goliath twice in immediate succession, first emphatically without a sword and second emphatically with one).

To me, this editorial decision is so profoundly puzzling that I cannot stop thinking about it. I am aware of some common ingredients in standard answers to why the text looks this way: A great value placed, perhaps due to political necessity, on preserving both traditions rather than prioritising the one over the other. The fact that while some doublets can be preserved by repeating similar stories (someone passing off his wife as his sister logically could happen more than once), other things can’t be repeated like that (even if it’s awkward to have the Flood last only forty days and one hundred and fifty days in one story, you can’t tell one after another within the same narrative if there’s to be only one deluge). And yet, as explanations, they feel as fragmentary to me as the preceding sentences might strike the reader; I still don’t really understand how someone could find this a satisfying solution, on purely literary grounds; it simply isn’t how a story works in my mind. (And this has nothing to do with whether you treat this as putative history or recognise it as pure myth; my problem here has to do with literary structure, not historicity.)

I think what I’d really like to see is a book that explores this topic by giving a broader overview of narrative construction in general and in the Ancient Near East in particular, compares it to the development and (if ever applicable) recombination or reconciliation of parallel narratives in other cultures, and so on. Unfortunately, if such a book exists, I have not been able to find it. If I had infinite time and energy, I would go back to university, earn another degree or two, and write that book as a monograph. If I instead had infinite money, I’d endow a grant or scholarship somewhere in return for somebody writing it. As it is, I suspect I may go to my grave many years from now still wondering why, oh, why those biblical redactors had such a profoundly weird editorial approach.

How is this the way anyone decides to combine two stories?