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CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
THE MANY USES OF INTERTEXTUALITY IN BIBLICAL STUDIES: ACTUAL AND POTENTIAL^1
David M. Carr
Twelve years ago, at the Oslo IOSOT meeting, Michael Fishbane opened his lecture with what he called a “bold and comprehensive assertion about intertextuality generally and biblical intertextuality in particu- lar.” It was that “intertextuality is the core of the canonical imagina- tion” and furthermore that “intertextuality is the form that literary creativity takes when innovation is grounded in tradition” (Fishbane 2000, 39). In his presentation he went on to distinguish three “levels of canon” in which textual authority is established in a given culture through intertextuality, that of the proto-canonical “canon before the canon” (where later biblical traditions interpret earlier ones), a “canon within the canon” where particular biblical traditions are gathered into sub-collections to comment on each other (for example, Qumran Florilegium), and the “canonical corpus itself ” which he considered particularly in relation to post-canonical rabbinical interpretation. It was in relation to this last phase that Fishbane stated that “Nothing so marks this exegetical culture as 1) the fact that all interpretation takes place within the canon and presupposes that all its texts may be compared or in some way correlated; and 2) the assumption of the omni-coherence of Scripture in all its details.”^2 Certainly Fishbane has been among the leaders in highlighting the way in which the interpretive impulse is not an invention of the rabbis,
(^1) This essay, like others in this volume, originated as an oral presentation at the August 2010 Congress of the International Organization for the Study of Old Testa- ment. I thank the local committee for their invitation to speak, and I am grateful to the audience for their questions (especially Konrad Schmid, who answered my request to review the oral version of the presentation and repeat his questions), many of which I used as a spur to clarify and (hopefully) improve this published version. Though I have removed many of the more obvious marks of the original oral Sitz im Leben of this piece, I have not attempted to mask it. (^2) Emphasis in original. For the overall article, see Fishbane 2000, 39–44, and for this quote see p. 43 of that piece.
but is found throughout the Bible, often in forms that anticipate later interpretive modes, and his correlation of three “levels of canon” in his IOSOT presentation was an appropriate outgrowth of this major impetus in his work. In the spirit of commentarial dialogue, I start this presentation with a look back at Fishbane as a way of opening a question about how far such analogies between interpretive modes really hold. How analogous, more generally, is post-canonical inter- pretation—as accurately described by Fishbane in the latter part of his lecture—to the range of use (or not) of tradition in pre-canonical Hebrew literature? To what extent is the concept of “inner-biblical exegesis” a plausible and coherent concept? And, finally, I will propose that the concept of “intertextuality” as developed in literary studies, a concept quite distinct from Fishbane’s evident use of the term, could prove helpful in elucidating the actual relationships to tradition that pre-canonical biblical texts once had to their varied precursors. I engage in this task out of a conviction that this issue of intertextu- ality in biblical literature is a strategic and widespread issue for study of the Hebrew Bible more generally. Indeed, in a scholarly climate where relatively deep rifts separate biblical scholars on different sides of the Atlantic regarding the formation of the Pentateuch and histori- cal books, the dating of the rise of literary prophecy, and many other issues, one comparatively common element to North American, Euro- pean, and Israeli scholarship of the last decades has been an increasing interest in the multitudinous ways in which biblical texts are thought to draw on each other. Though this is well documented in Fishbane’s monumental Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel and the work by a number of his distinguished students, such as Bernard Levinson and Benjamin Sommer (Fishbane 1985; Sommer 1998; Levinson 2008), it is also particularly characteristic of several students of Carol Newsom at Emory, such as Patricia Tull, who presented alongside Fishbane at the IOSOT in Oslo. One of the most extensive introductions to inner- biblical interpretation was written by Yair Zakovitch (Zakovitch 1993). And this phenomenon is widespread as well in Europe, say in the work of Odil Hannes Steck on the scribal character of the Isaianic corpus in particular and contributions by students of his, such as Reinhard Kratz, Konrad Schmid and others,^3 or the programmatic and charac- teristically decisive statement by Christoph Levin that:
(^3) See the helpful overview in Schmid 2000.
(!#!' = 3, “congregation of Y>>”), and the report of Aaron’s death
(Num 20:22–29; see Frevel 2000, 281; Achenbach 2003, 357–67 [with focus on Deut 31:48–52]; Nihan 2007, 23–25). Another ground for seeing Num 27:15–23, along with the report of Aaron’s death in Num 20:22–29 as late is because both are seen as dependent on the story of rebellion at Qadesh in Num 20:1–13, and this text in turn is seen as late because it is seen as referring in Num 20:13 to a showing of Y>>’s glory that presupposes a post-P H in Lev 22:32 and because
it features (in Num 20:12) use of the Hiphil of 0/ (“trust”), which is
a leitmotif of Exodus 4 (4:1, 5, 8, 31; see also Exod 14:31; 19:9; Num 12:7; 14:11; Nihan 2007, 25). Exodus 4 in turn is seen as late, particu- larly because of its posited dependence on P’s depiction of the first two plagues (Schmid 1999, 203–6 [ET 188–90]; Gertz 2000, 311–17). In sum, one thing that characterizes many of the developments just summarized is the way that decisions on the relative and absolute dat- ing of biblical traditions often are based on an ever expanding network of intertextual associations that are taken to be established by prior studies. One given of scholarship, particularly as pursued in the Wis- senschaft model of European scholarship, is that you do not need to reinvent the wheel every time you want to design a new car. Or to put it in the terms of this presentation, if you want to date text X based on its relationship to text Y and an array of texts on which Y depends, you do not need to reestablish the intertextual links of text Y if that has been done by others. To be sure, the mountain of intertextual associations that are taken as given is different for different schools of Hebrew Bible scholarship, and this is one place where this is a strategic issue for future progress in the field. For one of the primary features dividing different schools of scholarship on the Hebrew Bible from each other is the extent to which scholars and groups of scholars presuppose quite different sets of intertextual relationships from each other. Since such intertextual relationships play an increasingly important role in broader theory formation, this is a significant problem. Insofar as scholars aim for results which are not just recognized within the limited confines of a group of students or regional sub-group (for example, North America or German-speaking Europe), it is imperative that these divisions in basic understandings of the relationships between parts of the Bible be overcome, or at least ameliorated. This cannot happen, however, without more methodological reflection on the assumptions standing
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behind the identification of intertextual connections, dynamics sur- rounding the development of intertextual relationships in the Bible, and interrogation of the conceptuality surrounding the relation of bib- lical texts to their precursors.
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Let us start with a brief review of how the term “intertextuality” devel- oped in literary studies as a contrast to earlier literary studies of influ- ence. Within literary studies, the term “intertextuality” was initially coined (and later discarded) by Julia Kristeva as a way of characteriz- ing the way in which she saw each text as composed of and its mean- ing dependent on a tissue of other texts, which in turn are dependent on an array of other texts, in an infinite regression of complex and unresolved intertextual relationships. A writer, in this model, did not really create something new, but always has to work with preexisting materials, building a collage out of “already read” semiotic elements which could then lead a “reader” in a variety of directions, depending on how they construed this juxtaposition of pre-existing sememes.^5 This concept of intertextuality as developed by Kristeva can be clari- fied by contrasting it with prior literary study of “influence” or “allu- sion.” Such study of influence arose in the eighteenth century amidst concerns about originality and literary genius, and the concept of “influence” still bears marks of its origins. For someone studying influ- ence, a key focus was establishing the extent to which a given author of a piece of literature was dependent on a prior one and assessing how the later author had innovated vis-à-vis earlier precursors in the literary canon. The relationship of influence was usually conceived of as a binary one, that of the later work to an earlier foundational one in the literary canon. Moreover, the relationship was conceived in broad terms, that is looking at how the essential dimensions of a given work
(^5) The classic discussion is Kristeva 1980, especially p. 66, but also see 36, 69, 86–87. For her replacement of the term intertextuality with “transposition” see Kristeva 1984, 59–60, and for further discussion of background to the concept, see especially Kristeva 1989, 280–82. See in particular Allen 2000, 33–77 for a broader discussion of Kristeva and some of her more immediate heirs, including hers and some of their more radical ideas about the constitution of the reader him/herself(s) by multiple textual intersections.
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all kinds, which in turn were composed of fragments of earlier texts of all kinds in an infinitely complex and unreconstructable network of potential associations. And this fragmentation of the text, looking at how it is composed of all sorts of previously used speech, is another hallmark of intertextual study in contrast to the frequent broader focus of influence studies. Moreover, “text” in this discourse often was a broad concept, that could include an artistic image, popular discourses about taboos and/or superstitions, songs, etc. It was not at all limited to poems and novels in a literary canon.^7 This non-canonical focus is illustrated through the following diagram (Fig. 2).
Finally, though many would quarrel with this dimension of intertex- tual work, a given author might or might not consciously insert such broadly “textual” elements in their work. These are not conscious “allusions.” Instead, authors of any time or age always had to work with chunks of language and language patterns that had, whether they knew it or not, been previously used in earlier textual combinations, which in turn were dependent on earlier, quite different combinations in an infinite and amorphous semiotic network. Thus, though the
(^7) For further discussion of this latter crucial point see Morgan 1989, 30–38; Mai 2000, 47–51; Beal 2000; Bazerman 2003, 83–95 and Kujansivu 2004, 10–14.
Fig. 2. The non-canonical focus of intertextuality.
author might conceive of him- or herself as an originating “genius,” they actually were more of a rearranger of semantic bits, previously used metaphors, plots, themes and concepts. A quote from Barthes’s famous “Death of the Author” essay states this clearly, and one can see his counterpoint to the focus on originality in study of influence: “The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture... The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the one with the others in such a way as not to rest on any of them” (Barthes 1977, 146). Thus a writer can only put certain pre-used words into play with others. There is no internal meaning. Particularly striking here, especially for author-oriented biblical scholars, is the de-emphasis on authorial mastery in this model of writing. To be sure, one might rightly object that a given writer does make certain choices that have effects in a given textual work, choos- ing certain words, not others, certain plots or motifs and not others. I attempt that in writing this essay. Nevertheless, Kristeva, Barthes and others have raised the question of how much authors really are the full masters of their texts, particularly in light of insights of psychoanaly- sis, Marxist criticism and other theoretical developments that have shown a multitude of ways in which the discourse of human beings is shaped by forces beyond our control: actions of the unconscious that are, by definition, inaccessible; various dimensions of unconscious ideology; etc.^8 Even if one does not grant their entire approach, one must concede that any human author only imperfectly puts their con- scious stamp on their work. Authors do their best, but both ancient and contemporary authors were and are not unified, perfectly rational and conscious subjects. As anyone can say who has graded hundreds of student papers, we humans do not always mean what we write. One good example of this is a masters thesis that I wrote, which was an anthropological study of an urban church located in Atlanta, Georgia, where I unknowingly renamed the church I was writing about after a famous insane asylum in New York City. On a conscious level I had no idea of the association, but I think on some level I did know of it. There is a good chance that I was unconsciously calling the church where I did my work a “mental hospital.” This was a humbling
(^8) On this see Morgan 1989, 256–61 and Allen 2000, 47–56 (on Kristeva) and 70– (on Barthes).
An intertextual approach would look more broadly at potential inter- texts (literary and non-literary, written and non-written), be more open to an infinite regress of potential intertextual links, and be less focused on authors, whether Eliot’s foundational genius on the one hand or on what Hardy did or did not know on the other. On the most basic level, one can trace the theme of unwed births and infanticide before Eliot’s Adam Bede in 1859 to Sir Walter Scott’s novel Midlothian published originally in 1818, and Wordsworth’s poem, “The Thorn,” published in
- This complicates the usual binary relationship that is the focus of most studies of influence and authorial anxieties surrounding it. But, as Mary Jacobus has shown, the motif of an abandoned, working class woman killing her child, a motif often connected with the image of the thorn tree, was a widespread literary commonplace in eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature, common across ballads, nov- els, poems and other literature (Jacobus 1976, 224–28).
Indeed, and here we venture outside of the literary canon, dynamics surrounding unwed births and infanticide are reflected in eighteenth and nineteenth century laws specifying the execution of mothers who kill their infants, lurid stories about infanticide in newspapers of the time, paintings, and tombstones. An intertextual study of the motif of infanticide in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles could survey it as part of this soup of near and far intertextual analogies in circulation at the
Fig. 4. Elements considered in an intertextual perspective on Hardy’s Tess.
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time, both in literature and beyond (Fig. 4). Such an intertextual study would not purport to identify the precise origination point of Hardy’s use of the term, nor his intentionality behind it. Instead, it would explore layer upon layer of cultural meaning surrounding this motif, including intricate ways in which Hardy’s use of this motif might be unconsciously bound up in broader intertexts of discourses about gen- der and class (insofar as these laws and discourses often focused on working class women), colonialism, and other cultural cross-currents of the late nineteenth century of Thomas Hardy’s England. For, as dis- cussed above, an intertextual study of Hardy’s Tess would not assume that Hardy was the full master of his text, but would allow for ways the fragments that he put together had a “life of their own” as one might say, both in his unconscious and the broader ideological uncon- scious of the various social groups of which he and his audiences were a part. In sum, as a distinctive concept in literary studies, “intertextuality” at least in its origination point was quite specifically directed against a focus on texts in any kind of canon, against the identification of any specific source or sources behind a text, and uninterested in con- scious authorial imagination. Compare this to Fishbane’s assertion that “intertextuality is the core of the canonical imagination.” Or his observation, correct as it is, that a key presupposition of exegetical cul- ture is that “all interpretation takes place within the canon” (Fishbane 2000, 39, 43). Clearly, we are talking about different sorts of “intertex- tuality” here! Now at this point let me be clear. I think Fishbane is largely right about the norms surrounding much Jewish and Christian interpreta- tion of scripture, and I am not criticizing Fishbane or anyone else here for failing to be true to the original intention behind Kristeva’s and others’ use of the term “intertextuality.” Even if it could be established, and it can be, that Kristeva was disdainful of concepts of intertextuality as a search for specific canonical sources of a piece of literature (see, for example, Kristeva 1984, 59–60), one could also point out, as Susan Friedman has, that it would be profoundly ironic to cite the origi- nal intention of Kristeva against someone’s appropriation of the term “intertextuality.” After all, a major thrust of her theoretical enterprise was the undermining focus on original authorial intention (Friedman 1991, 153–54). And indeed, Fishbane would not be the first to take study of “intertextuality” in directions that Kristeva and Barthes did
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In contrast, I suggest that the ancient biblical texts that we study were formed in a context lacking this sort of canonical corpus. Insofar as biblical authors did work with prior traditions, they were differ- ent in both contents and conception from the contemporary Chris- tian Bible or Jewish Tanach. Though Fishbane and others have shown some analogies to later scriptural modes of reasoning in inner-biblical interpretation, there is a major gulf between the Bible on the one hand and later compendia of Jewish biblical exegesis on the other. Biblical authors did not have our canon or a proto-canon. Indeed, as I and others have argued, they worked within a largely non-literate world where even literary written texts were memorized (often using the help of written copies) and performed. They echo and interweave vast worlds of discourse, including almost certainly exclusively oral dis- course (in a primarily non-literate society!), to which we have limited (or no) access. And whatever interpretation they perform on earlier texts is only misleadingly characterized by contemporary terms such as “exegesis,” at least insofar as such terms are focused on the enter- prise of extracting a meaning from a text somehow independent of the knowledge and presuppositions of the interpreter and/or interpretive community. However much rabbinic or Christian interpretation ever was governed by specific hermeneutic rules to govern and adjudicate between interpretations, such rules do not play a consistent role in the generation of biblical texts. In sum, as Fishbane suggests, the Bible was formed in a fundamentally pre-canonical world, and as such I sug- gest it is decisively different from the world in which biblical scholars now work.
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Many of these distinctions seem so obvious when I state them, but I am arguing that they are not so obviously observed in practice. Let us take the garden of Eden story in Gen 2:4–3:24 as an example. Recent studies by Blenkinsopp and Otto have used theses about tex- tual dependence to argue that this text, long thought to be part of the early pre-exilic J source, actually is a post-Deuteronomistic and indeed post-Priestly text. For example, both have argued the use of the expres-
sion #!%'1'# (“and he placed him”) to describe Yahweh’s placement of
the first human in the garden (Gen 2:15) is reminiscent of the Deu- teronomistic use of the same root to describe Yahweh’s placement of
Israel in the land (Deut 12:9–11 [also !%#1/, “resting place”], 25:19;
1 Kgs 8:56 [!%#1/]). Furthermore, they have maintained that the
expulsion that follows the human disobedience of the divine com- mand in Eden parallels the consequence for disobedience in the Deu- teronomistic history: exile (Blenkinsopp 1992, 66; Otto 1996, 179–83). They propose other links to the Deuteronomistic history as well, such as the idea that the seductive serpent symbolizes illicit religious cults or the role of the first woman in eating of the tree parallels the role of Solomon’s wives in tempting him toward idolatry (1 Kgs 11:1–8; Blenkinsopp 1992, 66; Otto 1996, 178). And Otto, in particular, argues that Genesis 2–3 is a post-priestly explication of the “how” of animal and human creation, expanding on the brief statement seen previously in the priestly description, Gen 1:24–27 (1996, 183–84). If one were working within a canonical framework, marked, as Fish- bane notes, by a focus on finding related texts within the biblical canon, such comparisons have some currency. After all, within both Jewish and Christian religious interpretation, it is an ancient idea that one can find analogies within scripture between different laws, events and/
or prophecies. Within Judaism, the formal rule for this is !#< !:$
(equal or identical category) or <9'! (analogy), but Protestant exege-
sis has formulated similar rules of scripture interpreting itself (scrip- tura scripturam interpretatur) and analogy (analogia scriptura), and these were but formalizations of centuries-long practices within both Judaism and Christianity that assumed the unity and non-contradic- tory character of the canon, and then used various parts of the canon to illuminate others. Within this broader interpretive framework, the question is not whether there is an analogy elsewhere in scripture to a given text, but where the best analogy lies. If someone cannot produce a better analogy than the one proposed, the comparison holds. Within this framework, one could argue that the placement of Adam and Eve in the garden anticipates the later placement of the people in the land, and one could ground that reading in an argu-
ment resembling the rabbinic rule of !#< !:$ in the terminological
hook through the common use of the term %#1. One could continue in
this vein by drawing an analogy between the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden, and the exile of Israel from the land. Moreover, Otto’s proposal that Genesis 2 is an elaboration of Genesis 1 is a mod- ern version of a very ancient reading of the two chapters in relation to each other, with Gen 2:4b–25 describing in detail the sixth “day”
who combined the two, a point illustrated by the striking incongruities that exist between the two, secondarily joined narratives in order and concept of creation.^12 This example begins to point to a significant difference between the study of modern literature, where the term intertextuality first arose, and the study of the Hebrew Bible. For, in the case of a nineteenth century novel like Tess we have a rich array of non-canonical cultural artifacts to fill out our picture of the intertextual world of that novel: newspaper accounts, popular science articles, laws, criminal court records, etc. Even though our cultural record for nineteenth century England is nowhere near complete, it is far more extensive and com- plex than the confines of the literary canon of works from that period, as illustrated in the diagram (Fig. 4) that I initially used to illustrate potential realms of intertexts. In the case of ancient Israel, however, we have only paltry textual remains from the region and period in question, and these paltry remains are far outweighed by the material in the Hebrew Bible itself. This may be illustrated by the diagram (Fig. 5), which only begins to show the way the bulk of the Hebrew Bible writings far outweighs the handful of inscriptions, records, letters, and assorted other types of inscriptions found in the immediate world of pre-exilic Israel. More- over, this picture would remain essentially the same if we transmuted it to the Persian and Hellenistic setting of the final formation of the Bible, scanty non-biblical remains in comparison with the canonical texts. What this means is that, practically speaking, a biblical scholar has virtually no material with which to execute a specifically intertextual study of a biblical text. Rather, with the exception of a few inscrip- tions, we are confined to the canonical boundaries more typical of influence studies. We simply cannot know the full array of cultural intertexts. This is true on several levels. As a second century '@ redac- tion, the Hebrew Bible does not provide access to the full array of written texts known to the various scribes who wrote biblical texts. Moreover, since Israel was a primarily non-literate society, we must
(^12) For a useful recent formulation of the editorial character of the connection between Genesis 1 and 2–3 see Witte 1998, 166. For additional critiques of Otto on this point see Blum 2004, 15–16.
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reckon with a substantial range of exclusively oral intertexts to which we lack any direct access through our written sources.^13 In sum, if we were lucky enough to have contemporary access to the intertexts that actually shaped a text such as Genesis 2–3, perhaps the picture would
(^13) The debate about literacy in ancient Israel has been obscured by dubious assump- tions about the easy learnability of the alphabet and ideas (perhaps originating partly in traditions such as Deut 4:6) that Judah and Israel were distinguished from their neighbors by their unusually great learning. For more extensive discussion of literacy in the ancient world and citation of relevant literature see Carr 2005, 13, 30, 70– (esp. note 43), 102–4, 115–22, 187–91 and the recent discussion in Rollston 2010, 115– 18, 122–26. On this, cf. the recent discussion of intertextuality by Cynthia Edenburg (2010), who concludes (p. 147) that evidence of forms of intertextuality inaccessi- ble to audiences consuming texts in purely oral ways “point away from the oral— aural environment assumed by Carr and others, and presume a small circle of highly literate writers and readers.” I (Carr), however, do not posit such a purely oral-aural environment behind the production and consumption of the Bible, but one in which a relatively limited circle of writers and readers internalized texts through the use of writing and then continued to use written exemplars of such texts for a variety of pur- poses: symbolic, teaching, performance, review. This model, I suggest, would as easily explain the sorts of irregularities observed by Edenburg as evidence of “copying” (e.g., pp. 140–41). Thus, although I believe Edenburg to be right in her critique of purely oral models of consumption of texts, I believe her association of my position with that set of models is incorrect. I must admit culpability in this mis-association of my approach with purely oral models, since the author generously shared an earlier ver- sion of the article with me and my reading overlooked this portion of her piece.
Fig. 5. The Hebrew Bible and paucity of existing intertexts (local).
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discourses, business interactions, artistic creations, etc.—in circula- tion in a broader culture. Insofar as this broader realm of intertexts is relatively inaccessible to biblical scholars (in contrast to the case of Hardy’s Tess or contemporary writings), “intertextuality” thus is best used to refer to the unknown background of biblical texts. One major drawback, in my view, to the use of the term “inter- textuality” for what prior literary scholars would have termed “influ- ence,” is the resulting loss of a term in biblical studies to designate the whole realm of more complicated and often unreconstructable relationships of a biblical text with prior discourses. Rather, I would urge the use of the term “influence” for cases where biblical scholars can establish a specific relationship between two biblical texts. Fur- thermore, I propose reserving the term “intertextuality” to designate a broader realm of often unreconstructable ways in which all biblical texts depend on already-used language from a variety of canonical and often non-canonical, even unwritten, sources in a variety of conscious and unconscious ways. Failure to maintain two separate terms for these realms would con- tribute to a tendency among biblical scholars to ignore the existence of an unpreserved array of intertexts and a resulting ignorance of the complex world that actually produced our biblical texts. This is a par- ticularly acute problem in biblical studies, I suggest, since biblical scholars—often working in Jewish or Christian theological contexts— are already too inclined to orient their work inside the boundaries of their biblical canons. Though I and others in the biblical-scholarship collegium often strive toward some kind of non-theologically based historical conclusions, we do not always escape the canonical presup- positions that have shaped our field and the institutions within which many of us work. Many, if not most, of us may not follow the idea of
!#< !:$ or “scripture interprets itself ” for our scientific work, but
we often still work as if the texts in the Bible constitute a self-enclosed and sufficient corpus of comparison with texts such as Genesis 2–3. It is all too easy with our limited access to non-biblical Israelite or Judean texts and with our existing canonical predispositions, to see the Bible itself as likewise formed as exegetical literature working with a semi-canonically bounded earlier corpus of texts quite similar to that of our present Bible and then see as one of our main tasks being the reconstruction of the interpretive relationships between different parts of this semi-canonical corpus.
In saying all this I do not deny that biblical texts depend on other biblical texts, and in some cases I think we can trace such dependence and learn much from it. In other words, “influence” is sometimes traceable in biblical studies! For example, both the level of sustained verbatim agreement (beyond isolated shared vocabulary) and other factors strongly support the idea that the author(s) of Deuteronomy 1–3 knew some prior wilderness narratives, the author(s) of Second Isaiah both quoted and refuted sayings found now in Lamentations, and that the author of psalm historical overview texts, such as Psalms 105 and 106, knew some form of texts now found in the Pentateuch. Here work by Fishbane, Hays and others can be helpful in identifying criteria that help identify whether a given biblical text has a recon- structable particular relationship to another text found in the biblical canon (or elsewhere).^14 Moreover, I would affirm that biblical authors probably were yet more dependent on other written texts, including texts that found their way into the Hebrew Bible and possibly even (at times) a rela- tively limited corpus including such texts, than we can reliably recon- struct.^15 After all, I have argued in another context that literate elites who formed extended literary-theological texts of the sort found in the Bible were probably shaped in an environment that encouraged extensive memorization of earlier texts (Carr 2005). This would sug- gest that any given author easily could and would draw on an array of memorized phrases, themes, etc. from earlier literature in the process of writing something new. In many, if not most, instances this did not constitute anything like “exegesis” of such earlier texts, insofar as “exegesis” implies a sustained, marked reflection of one text on the significance of another. Instead, biblical authors fluidly drew in both conscious and (probably) unconscious ways on memorized earlier oral-written tradition(s) on a variety of levels: word, phrase, paragraph,
(^14) See, for example, the oft-cited and thoughtful criteria developed in Hays 1989, 20–32. The challenge has been to allow oneself to be truly restricted by such criteria. Often authors review criteria such as those developed by Hays, only to posit a number of specific relationships between biblical texts on the basis of far weaker connections. (^15) In granting this, I still would question the extent to which the Hebrew Bible as a late Second Temple construct accurately preserves the sum-total of virtually any corpus of privileged oral-written literature that was internalized by the scribal masters who produced the biblical texts now before us. There is so much we simply do not and cannot know about the literary-theological worlds of biblical authors.
