Discontinuity, congruence and the making of the Hebrew Bible1

Abstract

The interruptions of the normal flow of the narration through change in, for example, narrator, literary genre, language or subject, in various discrete literary works (usually “books") of the Hebrew Bible have often been taken to be the signs of an involved process of addition and redaction which finally resulted in the work as we have it now. Here it is argued that one of the principles of composition of books of the Hebrew Bible was that certain striking structural features, for example such interruptions, were derived from other books in the Hebrew Bible and elsewhere, which explains the presence of many of these irregularities or discontinuities. The same process can account for many other instances of structural similarity of two works. A model for its formal description, effectively serving as a check on the assumption of structural dependence, is also presented here. The result is usually a work which is best described as a “literary dossier”, the structure of which is defined through its relation with another text. Three cases of such structural derivation are studied here: the dependence of Primary History on the Histories of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, of the Book of Daniel on Ezra and on the Joseph cycle of stories in Genesis, and of the Book of Ezra on Nehemiah. These unexpected structural links provide us with new information about the relationship and the date of origin of the books of the Hebrew Bible.