After the last post I was pointed to an article in the last issue of the Journal of Biblical Literature (128.2) by Joel Baden of Yale Divinity School. The article is entitled “The Tower of Babel: A Case Study in the Competing Methods of Historical and Modern Literary Criticism.”
What I found interesting about the article is that Baden shows some of the short comings of certain literary critics in their search for unity in the text. Some of the points made by these literary critics are just as easily explainable from a source-critical analysis. But Baden does not use his critique in order to write off literary criticism. Rather, he concludes:
The question necessarily becomes: Can source criticism and modern literary criticism coexist? The answer is a cautious yes. Both methods begin from the same place: the final form of the text. For source critics, the next step is back in time, to determine how the canonical text came to look as it does. For modern literary critics, the goal is to find a way, through literary-critical means, to understand the final form of the text on its own merits. There is no inherent conflict here, as the two methods move in absolutely opposite directions. The conflict, such as it is, comes about when one method is used to address the questions for which the other was intended—that is, when modern literary criticism, the goal of which is to provide the modern reader with the tools to understand and appreciate the difficult canonical text, is applied to the question of the compositional history of the Bible. The literary-historical background of the final form and the meaning the reader can find in it do not stand in opposition to each other; rather, they are complementary parts of a total reading of the biblical text. John Barton’s words of advice to biblical scholars are well worth heeding: “most of the texts they interpret need both historical and literary skill if they are to be adequately interpreted….When these methods are forced into confrontation nothing is accomplished, nothing proven; it is as if we are arguing in different languages: a veritable scholarly Tower of Babel” (222-24)
I really appreciated Baden’s take on the issue and found his article timely as I have been thinking through this issue. Has anyone else read Baden’s article? If so, did you have any thoughts?
28 October 2009 at 3.16 pm
Good quote!
28 October 2009 at 4.03 pm
I’ve read it! In general, I appreciate the methodological caution and clarity that marks Baden’s work. It is this lack of rigor that he exposes in certain types of literary arguments for textual unity, arguments that are still sometimes cited today as evidence against the doc hypothesis (I’m thinking particularly of Cassuto and the citation of him by certain groups of TRs that we know).
To an extent, for Baden, literary and source-critical have to coexist since his primary criterion for source-division is narrative continuity and discontinuity. Divine names, peculiar language, etc. are all very secondary to his approach. On the other hand, the imposition of “literary” cohesiveness on an incoherent text (the flood story, for example) fails to understand what the final form itself is doing. Thus both/and is a necessity!
29 October 2009 at 8.05 pm
I read and appreciated Baden’s article.
The biblical training I’ve received has been mostly oriented toward literary criticism, which fits the evangelical presupposition that there is unity the biblical texts, and in the texts as a whole.
I’ve more recently appreciated the value of source criticism, particularly in that it produces observations that aid literary criticism. How could we appreciate Luke and Matthew without understanding how they use Mark? The source criticism informs the study of the unified final form.
31 October 2009 at 12.13 am
A literary approach need not suggest that there is a total literary cohesiveness or unity in a text. An honest literary approach can and will recognize STRATA in a text. It merely goes beyond that to ask what STRATEGY lies behind putting the strata together in the way in now appears in the text’s final form.