Preface

1. Literary Text, Literary Approach: Getting the Questions Straight

Discourse and Source

Fiction and History

Form and Doctrine

The Drama of Reading

2. Narrative Models

3. Ideology of Narration and Narration of Ideology

Omniscience Charged and Monopolized: The Epistemological Revolution

The Omnipotence Effect: Control Claimed and Disclaimed

4. Viewpoints and Interpretations

Point of View and Its Biblical Configuration

The Wooing of Rebekah

Positions and Discrepancies Established

The Movement form Divergence to Convergence of Perspectives

New Tensions and Final Resolution

5. The Play of Perspectives

Narrator vs. God

Narrator and Reader vs. God and Characters Spheres of Communication

Three Reading Positions

From Plot to Perspective

From Ignorance to Knowledge

Privilege and Performance

6. Gaps, Ambiquity and the Reading Process

The Literary Work as a System of Gaps

The Story of David and Bathsheba: On the Narrator's Reticence and Omissions

The Ironic Exposition

What Is the King Doing in the City?

Uriah the Hittite Recalled to Jerusalem

Does Uriah Know about His Wife's Doings? The Twofold Hypothesis

What Does David Think That Uriah Thinks? The Three-Way Hypothesis

How Joab Fails to Carry Out David's Order

The Analogy to the Story of Abimelech and the Woman

On Mutually Exclusive Systems of Gap-Filling: Turning the Screws of Henry James and Others

7. Between the Truth and the Whole Truth

Foolproof Composition in Ambiguity

The Relevance of Absence

Temporary and Permanent Gapping

The Echoing Interrogative

Opposition in Juxtaposition

Coherence Threatened and Fortified

Norms and Their Violations

From Gapping to Closure: The Functions of Ambiguity

8. Temporal Discontinuity, Narrative Interest, and the Emergence of Meaning

Suspense and the Dynamics of Prospection

The Pros and Cons of Suspense in the Bible

Modes of Shaping the Narrative Future

Darkness in Light, or: Zigzagging toward Sisera's End

Curiosity and the Dynamics of Retrospection

Joseph and His Brothers: Making Sense of the Past

Surprise and the Dynamics of Recognition

9. Proleptic Portraits

Character and Characterization: From Divine to Human

Why the Truth about Character Does Not Suffice

The Art of the Proleptic Epithet

Epithets and the Rule of Forward-looking Exposition

10. Going from Surface to Depth

Character as Action, Character in Action

The Composition of Character and the Limits of Metonymic Inference

Old Age in Genesis

Good Looks in Samuel

11. The Structure of Repetition: Strategies of Informational Redundancy

Similarity Patterns and the Structure of Repetition

Formulaic Convention or Functional Principle?

Constant and Variable Factors

Verbatim Repetition

Repetition with Variation: Forms and Functions of Deviance

Repetition and Communication: Pharah's Dream

Basic Axes and Natural Combinations

From Natural to Functional Combinations

Deliberate Variation: (Figural) Rhetoric within (Narratorial) Rhetoric

Generic Transformation into Parable

Permutations and Some Complications

Repetition and Narrative Art: Some General Consequences

12. The Art of Persusion

Persuading in the Court of Conscience

Delicate Balance in the Rape of Dinah

The Rhetorical Repertoire

13. Ideology, Rhetoric, Poetics

Justifying the Ways of God to Man: Saul's Rejection

Dancing in Chains

Dialogue as Pressure, Variations as Judgment

Convergence with Belated Discovery: Rhetorical Overkill

Notes

Index