Here's an observation I hadn't noticed before.

As a rule, when a narrative event in the Bible seems important, the writer will render it mainly through dialogue, so the transitions from narration to dialogue provide in themselves some implicit measure of what is deemed essential, what is conceived to be ancillary or secondary to the main action. Thus, David's committing adultery with Bathsheba is reported very rapidly through narration with brief elements of dialogue, while his elaborate scheme first to shift the appearance of paternity to Uriah, and when that fails, to murder Uriah, is rendered at much greater length largely through dialogue. (Alter, of course)

Alter thinks that this may be because ancient Hebrew writers deemed speech 'the essential human faculty'. I wonder if it's more to do with matching narrative time and event time. Reading dialogue takes approximately the same length of time as the events it describes. Reading a narrative summary is usually much quicker, so the reader need not dwell on the events at length.

Alter, dealing with the issue of multiple sources in the OT, uses the analogy of the film montage. He quotes Sergei Eisenstein:

The juxtaposition of two separate shots by splicing them together resembles not so much a simple sum of one shot plus one shot - as it does a creation. It resembles a creation - rather than the sum of its parts - from the circumstance that in every such juxtaposition the result is qualitatively distinguished from each component element viewed separately... Each particular montage piece exists no longer as something unrelated, but as a given particular representation of the general theme.

There is an enormous difference between J, E, P or D as they may have existed (whether or not this actually was as scholars have attempted to reconstruct them) and the interwoven fabric of the Pentateuch. The isolated units, when skilfully combined with composite artistry, take on new significance within the whole. Meaning is found not only in the elements but in the relations between them.

I'm sure I've blogged before about Robert Alter's 'The Art of Biblical Poetry' and 'The Art of Biblical Narrative'. I'm currently re-skimming both and enjoying them again.

Here's Alter on the intrinsic importance of language:

Language in the biblical stories is never conceived as a transparent envelope of the narrated events or an aesthetic embellishment of them but as an integral and dynamic component - an insistent dimension - of what is being narrated. With language God creates the world; through language He reveals His design in history to men. There is a supreme confidence in an ultimate coherence of meaning through language that informs the biblical vision. When the action and speech of men and women, always seen in some fateful convergence with or divergence from divine instruction, are reported to us in biblical narrative, repetition continually sets their lives into an intricate patterning of words. Again and again, we become aware of the power of words to make things happen.

Well, obviously this isn't a pipe, it's a blogpost. But Magritte's famous painting makes an important point about distinguishing representation from reality. As he pointed out:

Just try to stuff it with tobacco! If I were to have had written on my picture 'This is a pipe' I would have been lying.

Adele Berlin makes a similar point with respect to the characters and events in the biblical narrative. We find there not the 'real' Abraham, three-dimensional, living, breathing flesh, but a representation of Abraham, painted in words. For Berlin and others, this distinction frees them from any concern for the historicity of the biblical narrative. There may be a 'real' Abraham, just as there may have been a 'real' pipe, but we can interact only with the representation.

Now it seems to me that there are a number of ways that we can expect the representation to differ from the reality, or a number of causes that make it different:

1. There will be limitations due to the nature of the representation. The painting is two-dimensional, the pipe is three-dimensional. The painting can show only one viewpoint, the pipe can be examined from many viewpoints. And so on.

2. There may be differences due to the artist's lack of skill. When I, rather than Rene Magritte, paint a pipe, there are likely to be errors in perspective, colour, form etc.

3. There may be differences due to the artist's deficient understanding of his subject. This is especially true of paintings not taken from life but from a secondary source. And it's also one of the difficulties with portraiture - where the aim is not to capture an image but a person.

4. There may be conventions in the representational form. Berlin illustrates this with an image of an Assyrian statue of a mythological creature that has the body and legs of a lion. You can see a similar statue here. The striking feature of this animal is that it appears to have five legs. One might think this resulted from either (i) the mythological nature of this beast, or (ii) the artist's lack of skill or understanding. However, it seems more likely that this apparent deformity results from the artistic convention that required a side view to show all four legs of the beast and the front view to show the two front legs.

This analogy with artistic representation is illuminating with respect to literary representation. There will, of course, be differences between the literary representation and the 'reality' and the careful reader will want to distinguish those differences which result from the medium, the limitations of the author, and stylistic conventions.

But we need not follow Berlin's dismissal of the historical reality. Insofar as the author intends to convey some part of this reality and is not prevented from doing so by means of their own virtuosity and the restrictions of the medium, they may yet be successful. The sculptor of the five-legged beast may have been representing a mythological creature, but (so far as I know) Rene Magritte painted a real pipe. And though we cannot know everything about the reality from the representation, we can know true things and important things.

The literary approach to the study of the bible has much to offer. It can help us to identify the conventions in the text which may otherwise leave us as baffled as the five-legged lion. It can help us to understand the limitations and the strengths of narrative representation. It can help us distinguish a competent author from a poor one and a reliably informed author from an ignorant one.

In fact, it can help us to better understand the reality represented by these texts, historical and theological.

At this site you can play around with a whole lot of pictures of different kinds of faces. You select any combination you like and the software 'averages' them for you. What's interesting is how similar the combined faces always appear. Pretty enough, but bland and dull. It seems to me that beauty is to do with being extraordinary and unique, not so much with averaged perfection.

If you log in to the site, you can upload your own images and try the same thing.