Abstract
The Hebrew Bible's narrative style has impressed interpreters of many periods and perspectives with its powerful tension between fragmentary speech and meaningful silence, summed up in Erich Auerbach's famous thesis that the Akedah is “fraught with background.” But is it possible to give a coherent account of what the Bible does not say? This article offers a comparative critical analysis of attempts to do just that, starting with Auerbach's Mimesis (1946) and continuing through the contemporary work of James Kugel, Robert Alter, Meir Sternberg, Avivah Zornberg, and others. It claims that, rather than the text itself, the Bible's “background” serves as a metaphor by which the biblical critic navigates a complex relationship with her own normative construct of the reader's mind. This comparison concludes with practical considerations about its potential for research and teaching in biblical poetics, understood as rigorous intersubjective communication, rather than as either method or ideology.
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