Katz Center Fellow Jacqueline Vayntrub on the Revitalization of Philology, Biblical Poetics, and Generational Dynamics in Biblical Authorship
March 03, 2020
by Jacqueline Vayntrub
This blog post is part of a series focused on the
research of current fellows. In this edition, Katz Center Director
Steven Weitzman sits down with Jacqueline Vayntrub, whose work examines practices of knowledge transmission in biblical and ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean narratives.
Steven P. Weitzman (SPW):
It’s a distinctive pleasure to have this chance to ask you a few
questions about your work because you and I have tackled some
overlapping areas in our research and share some interpretive
sensibilities, and yet you think in ways that go beyond the limits of my
thinking. I appreciate having my mind challenged and opened in that
way.
Your recently published book, Beyond Orality,
begins with a quote from Johann Gottfried Herder that all poetry has
its origin in speech. What did he mean by that, and how does your work
challenge that claim as it applies to biblical poetry?
Jacqueline Vayntrub (JV): It’s
a privilege to speak with you—and in particular, I don’t think enough
of these conversations happen in our field, but I think we stand to
learn much by looking at our objects of study through the questions of
others. One interesting paradox of the classic model of the “biblical
philologist”—the scholar of biblical texts and language—is that this
model is marked by a deeply held value for uncovering the text’s
singular origin story. But at the same time, this value is accompanied
by the goal of arriving at the “true” or “singular” reading of the text.
This often means that one’s interpretation is construed in competitive
terms, to render itself superior to all previous readings. This kind of
socialization makes it both difficult to recognize the effect one’s own
time and place has on their work—how we too are products of history—and
to see the value in the intellectual engagements others have had with
these same texts, to understand where they are coming from.
I decided to open the book with Herder’s
voice because, recognized or not, his thinking on ancient textualized
language and what it can tell us about culture has had an outsized
effect not only on our area of study, but on other fields such as
philosophy, comparative literature, and history, to name a few. And, in
fact, the Hebrew Bible is a unique locus of inquiry in that its study
leads us down varied paths. It leads us from the ancient Near East and
the birth of writing, to the role of the Bible’s interpretation in early
modern self-fashioning and political theory, to contemporary
challenges, to orientalism and colonialism. Herder’s statement, that all
poetry has its origins in speech, captures much of the Bible’s role in a
persistent way of thinking about the deep past—as both powerful in its
truth but primitive in its articulation—and how we consider ourselves in
relation to that past. Herder’s statement is also complicated by the
fact that we do not have transcripts of ancient Israelite singing but a
textualized anthology. And yet Herder’s statement is also profoundly
resonant for a reading of the biblical text, since the narratives in the
Hebrew Bible have painted a picture of their own past as one punctuated
by poetry and song. The task I wanted to set before me was to reconcile
these dissonant phenomena—the perception of poetry as a kind of
emotive, less rational literature that comes before the development of
prose; biblical poetry as it comes to us in written texts; and the role
poetry plays as character speech in the Hebrew Bible.
SPW:
In my work on related topics, I was under the sway of my dissertation
advisor James Kugel, who challenged how scholars distinguished between
prose and poetry in the Bible, and argued that the application of the
category of poetry to the Bible is anachronistic, a projection of a
later Hellenized literary category onto biblical texts that has
distorted what scholars and translators understand them to mean. Do you
share his challenge to the idea of biblical poetry? If you accept poetry
as a non-anachronistic category for the Bible, what is it exactly? What
are its defining characteristics or what distinguishes it from prose?\
JV:
Kugel’s observation in that regard is a rather important one. The study
of biblical poetry has long relied on Greek-inflected literary
categories, and yet genre categories and rhetorical principles native to
the Greek tradition do not correspond neatly to many of the categories
and principles that underlie the biblical texts. But perhaps the
question of what in the Bible is poetry and what is prose obscures a
more fundamental problem that we face as biblical scholars. The language
we speak as scholars is deeply indebted to forms of intellectual
expression that go back to fifth century BCE Athens. One of my goals in
the book was to show how our reliance on this intellectual tradition
fails to account for the different ways in which the biblical literary
tradition reflected upon itself in its compositional practices. Biblical
literature did not develop a theoretical and critical language—or at
least, a language that is recognizable from a Greek-inflected system of
literary categorization and evaluation. For that reason, the ways in
which biblical authors theorized and challenged generic boundaries will
necessarily look distinct from how Plato or Aristotle theorized their
own literary tradition. Instead of developing an external critical
apparatus, the biblical authors participated in literary criticism
within their craft, reshaping genres, themes, devices, and patterns of
expression. A deeper understanding of the biblical literary tradition
can be gained through mapping rhetorical strategies across genres,
including poetry, prophecy, wisdom, and law. A simple answer to the
question of what characterizes biblical poetry is that those texts we
frequently identify as poetry, with its recognizable rhythm and patterns
of organization, are speeches attributed to characters and often given
in their narrated voice. From that point, the questions—at least from my
perspective—can widen from “How do these texts fit into our literary
categories?” to “Why do these texts look the way they do?” and “Why is a
character’s voice an important way to frame certain kinds of
literature?” When you move towards those kinds of questions, you’ve
created the distance necessary to defamiliarize the text and the world
that created it—you allow antiquity to come back to life in a fuller and
clearer way, not molded by our own values and assumptions.
Click through for the rest of the dialogue.
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