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INTERPRETING BIBLICAL NARRATIVE; or
MAKING SENSE OF PUZZLING STORIES
FP 101 lecture, Sept. 26, 1989
Penny S. Gold
The title of my lecture today is "Interpreting Biblical Narrative; or, Making Sense of Puzzing Stories." Biblical stories are, indeed, puzzling. My goal for today is to heighten your sense of how these stories are puzzling, to convince you that this is a strength of the Biblical texts rather than a weakness, and to offer some strategies that may help you enter into those texts. In the course of my lecture, I will point out some characteristic features of Biblical narrative, and I will suggest how attention to these features can aid us in interpreting the stories you'll be reading. My hope is that with an enhanced receptivity to the text, you will be seduced by it--seduced into the act of interpretation--of making the text your own by applying your own wit and experience to the puzzle of the story.
I'd like to begin with a sample story--one short enough that we can share it here and examine it closely. (Indeed, I'll be spending about half the lecture on this story.) This is not a Biblical story, yet it is of a type that shares many features with biblical narrative, and so will serve our purposes. The story is called "The Treasure."[1]
There once was a man and his name was Nathan.
He lived in such poverty that again and again he went to bed hungry.
One night, he had a dream. In his dream, a voice told him to go to the capital city and look for a treasure under the bridge by the Royal Palace.
"It is only a dream," he thought when he woke up, and he paid no attention to it.
The dream came back a second time. And Nathan still paid no attention to it.
When the dream came back a third time, he said, "Maybe it's true," and so he set out on his journey.
Now and then, someone gave him a ride, but most of the way he walked.
He walked through forests.
He crossed over mountains.
Finally he reached the capital city.
But when he came to the bridge by the Royal Palace, he found that it was guarded day and night.
He did not dare to search for the treasure. Yet he returned to the bridge every morning and wandered around it until dark.
One day, the captain of the guards asked him, "Why are you here?
Nathan told him the dream. The captain laughed.
"You poor fellow," he said, "what a pity you wore your shoes out for a dream! Listen, if I believed a dream I once had, I would go right now to the city you came from, and I'd look for a treasure under the stove in the house of a fellow named Nathan." And he laughed again.
Nathan bowed to the captain and started on his long way home.
He crossed over mountains.
He walked through forests.
Now and then, someone gave him a ride, but most of the way he walked.
At last, he reached his own town.
When he got home, he dug under his stove, and there he found the treasure.
In thanksgiving, he built a house of prayer, and in one of its corners he put an inscription: Sometimes one must travel far to discover what is near.
This version of the story of "The Treasure" was published in 1978 by Uri Shulevitz as a children's book--hence the nice pictures.[2] But it is a story that dates back to at least the eighteenth century, when it was recorded as told by a prominent Jewish teacher, Rabbi Bunam. Rabbi Bunam's version was itself retold by the prominent twentieth-century theologian Martin Buber, in a collection of rabbinic tales that he published. The Buber version was retold and commented on by Heinrich Zimmer, an eminent scholar of myth and folklore. The Zimmer version was retold and reinterpreted in the autobiography of Mircea Eliade, another eminent scholar. I heard the story from Reverend Bernard Owen Brown, who told and interpreted it as part of a ceremony at my 20th college reunion. . . And now I'm telling it to you.
The story is simple enough to be told to a child--with no explanations necessary. Yet it's also captivating enough--puzzling enough--to be told, retold, and reinterpreted in many different settings, to very different audiences, over the centuries. This shows us that this story, like Bible stories and folklore in general, has characteristics that invite listeners to engage so deeply with it, that some are motivated to turn the story to their own needs, to tell it again--stressing some aspects, altering others, and leaving out yet others.[3] In this way, a folklore text is different from other kinds of fiction--for example, Tolstoy's story, "The Death of Ivan Ilych." Certainly many--including all of you--have struggled to find meaning in Tolstoy's story, to analyze it.[4] But it's not the kind of story that lends itself to telling and retelling over centuries. In fact, we would accuse someone of plagiarism if they did so. There is no such thing as a plagiarized retelling of folklore texts--they are intended to be passed on and retold. Some folklore texts--like the Bible[5]--may be considered so powerful that they are written down and preserved in one form as sacred; copied and recopied in that same form. Yet even then, the mystery and power of the stories demand multiple versions. We can see this in two ways. First of all, the sacred, written texts themselves may contain multiple versions of the same story. Hence the New Testament contains four gospels, each telling in its own parallel but somewhat different way the story of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. The Hebrew Bible (or the Old Testament as it's known to Christians), also in places contains different versions of the same event. As you'll read next term, for example, there are two versions of the story of the creation of human beings, one that has man and woman created together, both in the image of God, and one that has the man created first, with the woman coming later, formed from the rib of the man. But also, in addition to the ancient, sacred version of Biblical texts, there are many versions of the stories produced over the centuries for a wide audience. Indeed, most of you who have some familiarity with Biblical stories probably know them from simplified and modified versions written for Sunday school classes.[6] There is also a huge body of supplementary religious folklore that was written to fill in what were perceived as gaps in the sacred stories of the standard versions.
What is it that makes these stories so susceptible to retelling and revision? We can locate the openness--the seductiveness--of these stories in two places: their subject matter and their style. The subject of the story, no matter how specific in time, place, and circumstance, has to center on a question or issue that transcends that specific setting. These sorts of questions are generally either ethical ones (what should one do to live correctly, doing good, especially in difficult circumstances?) or metaphysical questions that ask about the order of things in the universe (why do things happen as they do?). In the story of "The Treasure," these types of questions are seen to be related to each other, as is commonly the case in folklore. That is, one question at the heart of the story is: Why is one man fortunate, gaining wealth (the poor Nathan), and why is one man not (the captain of the guards)? Because Nathan acted correctly, and was rewarded, the story tells us. And what must one do to act correctly? Finding answers to that question may not be straightforward. For if certain types of questions are typical of folkloric material, there are certain stylistic features that insure that answers to those questions are not readily apparent and that they are multiple--hence the intrigue of the stories over centuries and to varying audiences. The most striking of these stylistic features is the absence of attribution of motivation to the characters. For example, we are not told why Nathan finally paid attention to his dream, undertaking the long journey to the capital city. But like Abraham, in the first episode you read about in your selection from Genesis, Nathan goes ahead on the journey, and he persists in it (like Abraham), even when it looks impossible to find there what he was seeking.
So why does Nathan begin the journey and persist in it? Perhaps it has something to do with God, even though that word is not used in the story. For at the end of the story we're told that Nathan builds a house of prayer, in thanksgiving for his good fortune in finding the treasure, indicating that he attributes that fortune to some force outside himself (and hence the house of prayer), a force that sent him his dream, that sent it three times, that sent a dream to the captain of the guards, and that directed Nathan to that captain. That is, the thanksgiving and the building of the house of prayer tells us that Nathan did not consider the dream and his good fortune accidental--not at all. These events were purposeful, and he was rewarded in the end for taking seriously the dream, which was apparently a message sent from God. The captain of the guards, who laughed at the dream, and at the whole notion of taking the dream seriously, did not get the treasure, though he had been given the chance.
The story of Nathan is thus a religious story, religious in the sense that it makes reference to and sees as bearing ultimate importance some kind of reality outside of or beyond the kinds of experience within human control.[7] Let me say a word here about the usefulness of stories--particularly the kind of open, folklore-type stories I've been describing--for the discussion of religious issues. Abraham Joshua Heschel, a modern theologian, has characterized God, and God's relation to the world, as ineffable, unspeakable, incapable of description. How, then, can we talk about God, if God is ineffable? Stories are one way of talking about the ineffable--in fact, a much more common way than the more formal writings of philosophers and theologians. For while philosophers and theologians speak to a limited audience, educated enough to be able to follow their complicated language and arguments, the tellers of stories speak to a virtually unlimited audience--to all those who will listen to the tale. And indeed, religions around the world have depended on storytelling for promoting both devotion and understanding. Stories are a good way to talk about the ineffable because they avoid a direct attempt to convey a meaning. The meaning is implicit, not spoken--it's between the lines--and it can be captured only in the encounter and dialogue between the story and the reader. Even when an explicit message is given, usually at the end--as for "The Treasure," which gives us the message that "Sometimes one must travel far to discover what is near"--the message itself is given in such a way as to keep us wondering. What does that mean--"Sometimes one must travel far to discover what is near"? Do I literally have to go on a long trip and come back? What else does this apply to besides a treasure hidden in the ground? And what does the travel business have to do with the other elements of the story? With the dream, or with the dream's three-fold repetition? With the fact that Nathan walked most of the way, but that he sometimes got a ride? With Nathan's persistence at the bridge? With the captain of the guard and his laugh? With the treasure being under a stove?
In this way, one story--even one that at first glance may appear very simple--can be opened up by a variety of questions. Let me share with you some of the possible answers that readers might come to for the story of "The Treasure." In Heinrich Zimmer's interpretation, the stove takes on a central importance. Why a stove, he asked, for the location of the treasure? For Zimmer, the stove, or hearth, as the center of a house (you need to think of a small peasant's house, before central heating), this stove is symbolic of the location of our ultimate treasure--that it is deep inside ourselves, and not far away where we might seek it. "The real treasure," Zimmer says, "the treasure that brings our wretchedness and our ordeals to an end, is never far away. We must never go looking for it in distant lands, for it lies buried in the most secret recesses of our own house, in other words, of our own being. It is behind the stove, the life- and heat-giving center that governs our existence, the heart of our hearth, if only we know how to dig for it."[8] As perhaps Tolstoy would have said for Ivan: the truth was inside himself, if only he had searched within, instead of looking always to the opinions of others.
But what about the final message, as stated in the text, which asserts, yes, that what you want to discover is nearby, but that also says that you have to travel far to discover it? Zimmer continues: "There is, [yet,] the strange and constant fact that it is only after a pious journey to a distant region, in a strange land, a new country, that the meaning of the inner voice guiding our search can be revealed to us." But this is unsettling. Do we really need to literally travel outside the country--as in the story--to find "the meaning of the inner voice," the meaning of the dream, or that truth that is inside ourselves? Here, let me bring in my college chaplain and his interpretation of the story. Remember that I heard him tell the story at my 20th college reunion. More specifically, it was at a service to honor the memory of deceased classmates--people with whom we had graduated who had since died. Reverend Brown wanted to give some consolation to those of us whose friends were now absent through death. In his interpretation, Reverend Brown chose to stress the role of the captain of the guards in the "Treasure" story. For we can see in the story that not only does Nathan have to travel far, but that he also learns of the actual location of the treasure from a person very different from himself, a contrast nicely captured in the illustrations I showed you: Nathan a poor village type with a scruffy long coat, an untrimmed white beard, and a rough stick for help in walking; the captain of the guards, on the other hand, is sharply dressed in a shapely jacket and breeches, his dark mustache is neatly trimmed, and he carries the sword appropriate to his position of authority. In Reverend Brown's interpretation, on this particular occasion of a memorial service, and in this particular context of a university, the "travelling far" was not so significant. In coming to college, for example, some may travel far, but some may stay in their own home town. But even if not travelling far, what we all experience at college, he said, is that contrast between ourselves and others--like Nathan and the captain of the guard. At college we meet new people, usually a greater diversity of people that we've met in grammar and high school, institutions that are based on a small region, if not a limited neighborhood. And in this encounter with others, if we're open to hearing and responding to what the other person says, we find the truths deep inside ourselves. (Like Nathan, who listened carefully to the captain of the guards and immediately acted on what he heard.) Our friends who had died, Reverend Brown wanted to assure us, had, through their encounter with us--their friends at college--found "a treasure" before their deaths. And this can apply in other contexts too. Ivan Ilych, for example, can discover the truth about himself only though his encounter with people fundamentally different from himself--a child (his son), and a servant (Gerasim). He could not make the discovery through those just like him--his wife, his legal colleagues, the doctors.
Now let's try out another speaker, another context, another audience. For I have told the story to you--students and teachers immersed in the readings of FP 101, people who have all read Tolstoy, Plato, and Genesis. What point in the story of the treasure becomes a focus point, a center of interpretation in this context? For me, it's the matter of the dream--not commented on by Zimmer or Brown. The dream gets highlighted for me because here we are, in the week of FP 101 on religious perspectives, and the dream--and Nathan's response to the dream--seem to me central to the religious message of this story.
I'm also caught by the dream because I have noticed a similar kind of dream in Plato's Crito [44d]. Remember that when Crito tells Socrates that the ship from Delos will arrive later that day, and thus Socrates will die on the next, Socrates says no, he feels sure the ship won't arrive until the following day, and he'll die on the third, because he had a dream that conveyed that message clearly to him. In fact, when he recounts the dream (about a beautiful woman who says, "Socrates, may you arrive at fertile Phthia on the third day") Crito easily agrees with him that the meaning is clear--Socrates will die on the third day. What struck me about Socrates' dream is that here we have Socrates--that hard-headed questioner who lets no sentence go by him without picking it apart, and who shows us how difficult--and yet how important--it is to pursue truth through the vigor of close logical examination. Yet here he (and Crito too) immediately accept as "clear" what might look to us as quite cryptic. The key is that the dream does not come from another person--like Euthyphro or Meletus--but from some other place, or some other being. Like his inner voice, that tells him when he is about to do something wrong, this kind of voice Socrates listens to without questioning.