Style and Structure in Biblical Hebrew Narrative

Book excerpt: Style matters! The pages of the Hebrew Bible are filled with stories -- short or long, amusing or sad, histories, fables, and morality tales. The ancient narrators use a variety of stylistic devices to structure, to connect, and to separate their tales -- and thus to establish contexts within which meaning comes to light. What are these devices, and how do they guide our reading and our understanding of the text? This book explores some of the answers and shows that it's a matter of style. Fr. Jerome T. Walsh, Ph. D., is also author of 1 Kings in the literary commentary series Berit Olam: Studies in Hebrew Narrative & Poetry (The Liturgical Press, 1996) of which he is also an associate editor. He has contributed to such reference works as The New Jerome Biblical Commentary and The Anchor Bible Dictionary and frequently publishes articles and reviews in professional journals of biblical studies. He is a member of the Society of Biblical Literature and of the Catholic Biblical Association of America, with which he has collaborated on the second edition of the New American Bible translation of the Old Testament. He is head of the department of theology and religious studies at the University of Botswana.