Inner-biblical Allusion: Scripture's Reuse of Scripture

The Hebrew Bible was not written for the first-time reader. Not infrequently do readers encounter an ambiguity that they can decipher only after reading a story or passage elsewhere in the Bible. The Hebrew Bible is saturated with such veiled cross-references, which presuppose a readership that is intimately familiar with the whole of the Hebrew Bible. In the words of Meir Sternberg, the Hebrew Bible is a "web of words." It is replete with repetitions, prolepses, analepses, typologies, echoes, and allusions. Those who have read through the Bible many times are alert to such cross-references, but even so the reasons for all these cross-connections are often elusive. Their presence makes it very difficult to detect any flow of thought that runs through the whole. Readers are constantly thrust forward or thrust back, conceptually speaking. This feature of the Hebrew Bible, its pervasive self-referencing, is one of the major barriers faced by uninitiated readers of ancient Hebrew literature like the Hebrew Bible.

Literary allusions distinguish themselves from other types of literary cross-references in that they bear, in their compositional pattern, a fundamental irony. On the one hand, an allusion is rendered in a covert form, without citation formula or quotative. This makes them, at times, difficult to recognize and even more difficult to validate. On the other hand, they are meant to be observed, and their observation transforms the semantics of the context that they evoke or the context in which they appear. Not being overt, however, the nature of the transformation is often elusive and difficult to verify. Alluding is a customary habit of biblical authors, especially late biblical authors. Understanding dynamics of inner-biblical allusion is essential for interpretation. Inner-biblical allusions are also among the earliest preserved interpretations of Hebrew Bible, and are vital to a proper understanding of the history of Jewish biblical interpretation.

Although the academic study of inner-biblical allusion is nearly three decades old, the current state of the field resembles the field of comparative philology as it was practiced in biblical studies for well over one hundred years up to the writing of James Barr's famous book: Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament (1968). In a time when individual studies of comparative philology had been multiplied beyond number, Barr's work was needed as the first full-blown synthetic study of the field that considered the topic in a systematic fashion with a thoroughgoing methodology. Like the field of comparative philology before Barr, we now see individual studies of inner-biblical allusion increase at an impressive rate without the sort of systematic methodological reflection that Barr applied to that other field. The proposed project intends to fill this gap, to provide a synthetic work on allusion within the Hebrew Scriptures that consciously aims at giving the reader the analytical categories that are currently lacking.

This project has three groups of beneficiaries:

(1) Academics in biblical disciplines. The project aims to fill a lacuna in the methodologies of the field. The proposed project will enhance knowledge and develop methodology in three major ways. (a) Although there is extensive academic productivity in the subject area of inner-biblical allusion (and in related topics like quotation, scriptural reuse, and early Jewish interpretation), a comprehensive and coherent methodology for the identification and analysis of inner-biblical allusions remains a desideratum. (b) The habits and techniques of literary allusion in ancient Israel and Early Judaism has been enormously expanded in recent decades by the on-going study of literatures of the ancient Near East and Early Judaism (esp. c. 520 BCE-250 CE). This evidence will be synthesized, analysed, or applied to inner-biblical allusions in a systematic way. (c) The project will offer a clear examination of the relevance of the inner-biblical allusion to related biblical disciplines, including historical criticism, Early Jewish interpretation, and textual criticism.

(2) Academics and research students in related subject areas. The project will provide useful comparative data for academics and research students of literature. It will be of greatest interest, perhaps, to those working on allusion specifically, both those working in the field of literary criticism or those studying literary allusion and influence in other bodies of literature and from other periods of time. In as much as much of Western Literature is founded on biblical stories, tropes, and ideas, scholars and students of comparative literature and reception history will also find it of value. The symposium, in particular, will explore the possibility of parallel developmental phenomena in other cultural and religious traditions (e.g., the Classical Greek canon or the development of the Qur'an) or parallel literary phenomena in other literary corpora. Thus, it is to be hoped that the project will be of interest to lecturers, post-docs, and research students from any discipline, who have an interest in ancient texts.

(3) Non-academic religious professionals. A day-workshop is planned in the spring of 2014 (dates to be established) on the research theme with professionals in the field of religion (Christian clergy, para-church leaders, and teachers of moral and religious education) providing an opportunity to enhance intellectual engagement with the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) and to augment their professional skills. The workshop will provide an opportunity to introduce participants to the study of inner-biblical allusions, to collaboratively apply the methodology to a select text from the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament), and to explore its benefits and implications for teaching and/or preaching in religious and school contexts. Participants will be invited to make suggestions, before or during the workshop, on what texts or literary mysteries they would like to see discussed in more detail. I have experience designing and leading workshops for religious professionals, having done so on three occasions in the past (for the World Council of Churches [2008] and for Catholic Parish Service [2008, 2009].)