Toward a Poetics of a Renewed Philology: Interiority, Characterization, and Biblical Narrative

• In Event: Re-reading the Self: Reflection's Dynamics (Biblical/Rabbinic)

Abstract

This paper explores the intersection of philology, anthropology, and poetics. How does stepping away from what Clifford Geertz refers to as the “uniformitarian view of human nature” lead us to a reappraisal of the very language of the Bible? Indeed, terms associated with the modern self—words for emotions, cognition, perception, mind, virtue—are consistently employed in the translation traditions. How do such translation equivalents, which also involve the isolation and identification of key concepts, like “love,” “fear,” “knowing,” “honor,” and “humility,” impact biblical interpretation? More specifically how do such translations presuppose and also further a certain poetics, one in which the biblical narrative “fraught with background,” as it is, nevertheless draws real impetus in building a sense of the interior domain from key words in the narrative? If we read such terms with more of a focus on the material and social, what sort of new poetics emerges? Examples from various narratives in Genesis, including the Joseph narrative and the Garden of Eden will be considered with reference to postbiblical interpretive traditions as well.

Author

• David Arthur Lambert, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill