Kugel Versus Alter: Drawing a Blank on the Bible as “Literature”

James Kugel plays a strong foil to anyone who thinks Auerbach's “background” thesis describes something essential about how biblical narrative communicates. Throughout our period, Kugel has maintained the contrary.Footnote ⁸ Texts are produced and read by different interpretive communities with diverse hermeneutic assumptions. In the Bible's case, these assumptions have been radically distinct, pointing to incommensurable meanings. It is an elementary fallacy to ignore this fact and conflate the assumptions of the Bible's original audience with those of its later readers.Footnote ⁹ In this vein, Kugel criticizes the “literary” turn for assuming that modern lit-crit categories can be applied to biblical texts (at least not without so much modification that they grow cancerously complex and must be excised by Occam's razor). To represent these fallacies of the literary approach, Kugel targets one of Auerbach's corollaries to the “background” thesis: that the Bible's reticent style—unlike Homer's way of dressing his heroes in fancy epithets and genealogies—endows biblical heroes like David with the inner complexity and development that lit-crit calls “character.” For Kugel, these folks are far less complicated than literary critics would like them to be, because their audiences were also far less complicated. In place of Auerbach's “background,” Kugel inserts a term that will echo throughout this debate: blanks.

What is at stake when Kugel rejects the term “characters” and draws a blank instead? Specifically, what theory of the biblical reader's mind does his “blank” imply? The short answer: Auerbach, here, is a proxy for Kugel's colleagues on the literary-critical side of biblical scholarship. Rather than a critique of Auerbach, Kugel's move from “background” to “blanks” in this essay (“On the Bible and Literary Criticism”) is better read as an effort to police disciplinary boundaries. (The “and” in his title is disjunctive, as if to say: “The Bible is one thing. Literary criticism? It's all yours.”). Polemically motivated as it is, then, Kugel's two versions of the biblical reader are not really the originals versus the moderns, but two camps of moderns (Kugel vs. Robert Alter in particular). Kugel's camp is historicist, Alter & co.'s is literary-ist, but—here is the key to our longer answer—neither modern epistemology grants much psychological complexity to the Bible's reader. Kugel uses historical distance to create a primitive/modern split between readers, whereas Alter uses anachronistic proximity to posit equivalences between the Bible-as-“literature” and the implied author of this “literary” text. In other words, Kugel's historicism sets up a hierarchy in how primitives as opposed to moderns can interpret the text, whereas Alter assumes that the author's artful intentions dictate the reader's response, thereby downplaying differences between kinds of reader or modes of interpretation.

This polemic between Kugel and Alter comes to light when we see what a poor proxy for it Auerbach actually is. First, Auerbach did not mean the usual literary notion of “character.” Rather, his sense of “figures” [Figuren] referred to the original schema of “background,” “foreground,” and “figure” around which his argument in this chapter of Mimesis turns, a schema that has more to do with his work at that time on early Christian figural exegesis than with any modern lit-crit categories.Footnote ¹¹ But translations aside, the smoking gun for Kugel's polemic is that he has already, before turning to Auerbach, rejected the term “characters” for people in the Bible. Citing his own Idea of Biblical Poetry, Kugel “shuddered” to hear Joseph called “one of the most believable characters in the Bible,”Footnote ¹² which is more or less just what Alter says in his earlier Art of Biblical Narrative.Footnote ¹³ Similarly, when Alter picks up Auerbach's idea of “background” there, he attaches it to his literary term “character” (the title of this chapter is “Characterization and the Art of Reticence”).Footnote ¹⁴ These parallels suggest that, when Kugel draws a blank on biblical “characters,” he is refusing to recognize Alter more than he is really scrutinizing Auerbach.

Beyond this policing of disciplinary borders between historians and literary critics, Kugel's under-reading of Auerbach reveals a more important epistemological impasse. If history is what separates us moderns from the Bible's readers, as Kugel suggests, should we assume that they were ahistorical? On the other hand, if literature is what connects us to them, as Alter suggests, then how did they gain our modern literary sensibilities? By their disregard for these questions, we can see that at the level of interpretive capacity, Kugel and Alter grant the biblical reader little psychological dynamism or distinctiveness, respectively: Kugel excludes the reader from modern historical interpretation by making her totally different from himself, Alter includes her in modern literary interpretation by making her basically the same. In this polemic, each leaves out precisely the part of Auerbach's “background” thesis that should be most relevant to his own argument. Kugel neglects Auerbach's insight that biblical historiography was not just one mode of storytelling among others but a major antecedent of Western literary consciousness. Yet Alter ignores Auerbach's equally key point that interpretation of biblical narrative, however literary, remained determined by its specific historical interpretive frames. Thus, in Auerbach's dual valence of the “background,” we can recover a missed opportunity for reconceptualizing a true dialectic between historical and literary dimensions of the biblical reader's consciousness.

To begin from Kugel's side of this impasse, recall that he used his historicist warrant to claim that “literary” interpretation was alien to the Bible's original readers. Rather, he says, they read biblical narratives as history, “a tale which produces visible, verifiable results and in that sense is unarguably true, while literature is fiction.”Footnote ¹⁵ First, we should note that this is not at all the idea of history that Kugel himself uses to recapture the biblical reader's “history.” Far from it. He uses a modern positivist history (a straight-line accumulation of events; the past wie es eigentlich gewesen ist) to discover that the Bible's reader had a totally different history: a projection of their collective present back onto their ancestors in their collective past. This is history, Kugel says, in “the particularly biblical sense.”Footnote ¹⁶ But how particular is it, really? Kugel's definition of the biblical reader's idea of “history” should be easily recognizable to anthropologists as what used to be called “myth.”Footnote ¹⁷ Following from this historicist exclusion of the biblical reader from historical consciousness, he marshals a phalanx of binary oppositions that are no less readily recognizable to anthropologists: history versus myth, past-as-past versus past-as-present, modern versus primitive ... in short, us versus them.Footnote ¹⁸ These binaries also line up with a familiar mental hierarchy. Although he nods to the literary-critical term “interpretive competence” to account for the biblical readers' own way of reading the text, Kugel leaves us with the distinct impression that they do not have a different competence but simply that they have less. For example, rather than “elusive thematic connections,” he writes of biblical texts as organized by “mechanical principles”;Footnote ¹⁹ rather than historical narratives, he sees etiological explanations.Footnote ²⁰ In a revealing example, whereas we moderns may identify with the so-called “character” of Moses (the biblical interpreter, in a sense), Kugel insists that primitive listeners only identified with “the people” for whom the Bible's words were “too terrible to bear.”Footnote ²¹ Thus, just as he used historicism in order to exclude the Bible's primitive reader from his historical consciousness, Kugel excludes the reader from his interpretive competence by imposing one more binary between primitives and moderns: surface versus depth, which may be the root metaphor of the modern interpretive enterprise.Footnote ²²

Unlike Kugel, Auerbach grants the Bible's reader strikingly modern historical and literary competence. Both capacities, he says, were refined from the raw ore of its very narrative style:

Auerbach's portrait of the reader's sense of history includes what Kugel agrees to be its main difference from our own: biblical history is not the past-as-past but the past as a template for prophecy and revelation. Precisely because of this strong teleology embedded in its historical narrative (its line of development extending from our ancestors' past to our collective present and future), however, Auerbach proposes that the Bible also opened up new literary awareness to its reader. After all, even if, as Kugel says, “all that we need to know is told to us by the text,” then why does it tell us apparently trivial things? When we forge links from past to present, we are beckoned and compelled to interpret every detail—in Auerbach's Akedah, a “three day” journey, the lifting up of a pair of eyes, or a threefold repetition of the deictic “Here I am” (hinneni)—as a sign or omen against this narrative background of sacred history. Thus, if we accept Auerbach's internally complex model of the reader, historiography and fiction actually strengthen each other.

On his side of the impasse between “history” (fact) and “literature” (fiction), when Alter translates Auerbach's “background” into his own theory, he reciprocally ignores its historical aspect. As a result, Auerbach appears in Alter's work not as a literary historian but as an inferior literary critic.Footnote ²⁴ “It is one thing to say,” Alter concedes, “that the sparsely sketched foreground [...] ‘somehow’ implies a large background dense with possibilities of interpretation.” But Alter criticizes Auerbach for citing no “specific means” for “how this ‘somehow’ is achieved.”Footnote ²⁵ For Alter, the historical background that hovers over both the readers and the characters does not seem to count as a “specific” technical device. But rather than show how it works, Alter's sole discussion of history's role in the “background” (or what he dubs “the art of reticence”) implies just the reverse: the Bible's author used literary art to bless his figures with a rich modern character (replete with interiority, autonomy, etc.) as opposed to an impoverished historical one (superficial, full of linear and mechanical cause/effect chains, and other Kugel-like deficiencies). So it is that for Alter (pace Kugel and Auerbach) the Bible assumes a “strong, clearly demarcated pattern of causation in history and individual lives,” but (nevertheless!?) its characters' complex biographies “unsettle the sense of straightforward, unilinear consequence to which lazy mental habits—ancient and modern—accustom us.”Footnote ²⁶ For example, Alter implies, it would be a “lazy mental habit” to read Abraham as a pawn in a crude hierarchy of divine favor and disfavor, plotted in a straight-line story about how our people came to be. Somehow we should discern his rich character, above and beyond the narrative's merely conventional historiographical frame.

But what are the specific means, Auerbach would ask, by which the Bible's characters are “somehow” achieved? For Alter, the answer is too often self-evident: either he posits that the Bible's author applied (presumably universal) literary techniques of characterization, or he empathizes with the characters as (presumably universal) human beings. Auerbach, in contrast, points out that biblical characterization relies on a specific set of historical assumptions:

Auerbach agrees with Alter that Abraham has the literary depth of a “character,” not just the archetypal outline of an “ancestor,” as Kugel would have it. Yet by locating the Bible's historicity in the “dark and mysterious background” of its narrative style, Auerbach advances a more reader-sensitive theory of how this character is so fully realized. Abraham, like the reader, sees himself as a player in a historical drama of which his particular narrative, down to the smallest details, is merely an episode. He is far from a “blank,” nor is his rich interiority in any way separable from the fraught background of sacred history which guides and judges his every action. Rather, a dialectic between doctrine and promise, on the one hand, and everyday life, on the other, is incarnate in both the players and the audience of biblical drama. The audience interpret the heroes' humble lives against their historically “fraught” background; by charging them with these interpretations, history turns ancestors into characters. Hence Auerbach's compound term for that whole of which Alter and Kugel each captures only half: not personality or history but “personal history” [Personengeschichte]. For Auerbach, there is no necessary contradiction between viewing people in the Bible as historical ancestors and as literary characters, provided we do not subscribe to overly modern ideas of “history” and “literature.” Rather than distinct disciplinary compartments, they are two complementary tonalities; simultaneously collective and individual registers in which audiences must receive the text. Rather than linear positivist history (Kugel) versus the dense interiority of character (Alter), or the bare foreground of conventional tales (Kugel) versus the dark background of literature (Alter), or the simple surface of didactic explanations (Kugel) versus deep moral turmoil (Alter), etc., Auerbach theorizes biblical narrative as a three-dimensional interplay between everyday human lives and historical interpretations. This interplay yields new “depths of time, fate, and consciousness.”Footnote ²⁸

This critique of Kugel and Alter (by way of Auerbach) has given us some clarity about three criteria for further comparative analysis.Footnote ²⁹ First, it is unsatisfactory to try to fix biblical narrative as history or literature, fact or fiction, even if we acknowledge, as Alter and Kugel do, that these are both genres of discourse rather than gradations of one empirical reality. Second, then, we need a theory that reflects Auerbach's dialectic between historical interpretation and literary artistry, especially in order to illuminate how both modes of reading biblical narratives produce its individual characters, in all their personal depth and collective scope. Finally, we know that only a theory which takes the reader's role more seriously can satisfy these requirements. Such a theory should describe, in detail, the actual process of interpretation as it unfolds over time, pinpointing particular vectors of interaction between what the narrative says (or doesn't say) and the reader's possible responses.

Sternberg's Rationalism: A Method for Sorting Blanks from Gaps

Although he wrote it over a decade before Kugel and Alter's debate, Meir Sternberg's first book also responds to Auerbach's Mimesis, agreeing with Kugel and Alter that it begs the question of literary criticism versus historicism. With typical acerbity, Sternberg insists that this is a false dichotomy, reframing the interpretive imperative in terms that are worth citing at length:

Here, in a nutshell, we rediscover Kugel's and Alter's interpretive warrants alongside the kernel of Sternberg's alternative. Now Sternberg ascribes Kugel's strict historicism to Auerbach: the danger of lit-crit is that it finds meaning in the Bible's holes whereas in fact they are only “blanks.” Before ascribing modern literary sensibilities to the ancient reader, we should try to understand their own “theory of literature” and hear the text as they heard it; only then can we decipher what it does not say. Sternberg also alludes to Alter's alternative solution, but he rejects it as unverifiable: the text is an irreducible whole, communicating in multiple “orders of mind,” including, of course, however literature communicates. So why not simply assume that the silence surrounding the heroes is a special means of characterization, not a “blank” (or, more generally, that the Bible's lacunae reflect its “profound art, not primitiveness”) and then submit this postulate to a reader's basically shared human ability to understand how it works in the text?

Sternberg's alternative starts from the premise that the Bible does not say everything it means, but nor can it mean anything that it does not say. What we need, then, is a robust functional theory of how, based on what biblical narratives do tell us, we are warranted in selecting some, but not all, of their implicit meanings for analysis. How are we to distinguish “noise” from meaningful emanations of the Bible's “background”? How do we refrain from fixating on the serifs of the Bible's letters, like certain earlier overeager exegetes? Or, in Sternberg's terms, how do we sort mere “blanks” from “gaps,” that is, significant breaks in the flow of narrative communication? For him, this blanks/gaps distinction is more essential than any generic definition of biblical narrative as “history” or “literature.” Given its anchor in the reader's innate cognitive capacities and natural responses, Sternberg's blanks/gaps distinction is “a universal of reading that no one can escape for a moment, including those who shudder at the very mention of interpretation.”Footnote ³¹ While Kugel “shuddered” to hear lit-crit terminology applied to our biblical ancestors, even his historicist horror cannot extend to the “primary narrative interests” of our mind, which have hardly changed since biblical times. Similarly, while Alter leaned heavily on authorial intent in order to account for literary effects like suspense, Sternberg refocuses our attention on the reader. In his new theory, rather than the author's invisible hand, it is the reader's narrative interests—curiosity, surprise, and suspense—that drive her to make sense of what the text says or doesn't say, steering her interpretive course as she tacks between blanks and gaps.Footnote ³² Further, these elementary narrative interests align along a single vector of interaction between text and reader: temporality. The way narrative flows over time—not (our) modern history, not (their) primitive myth—but time itself, as this flow reflects and reshapes the reader's mind, is the epistemological engine of what Sternberg calls “the drama of reading.”

To unveil this drama, Sternberg's method sorts gaps from blanks—meaningful from meaningless holes in the narrative—in relation to the reader. A “blank” is simply without interest, whereas a hole that piques our narrative interests—suspense, curiosity, or surprise—is a “gap.” Our interests can be subdivided this way because we try to close each gap differently, depending on how it fits into the narrative's temporal structure so far. Suspense is prospective: we look forward to closing a gap between what we know now and what we will learn. Curiosity is retrospective: we fill in a gap between what we are learning and what we do not yet know about the past. And we experience surprise when we thought there were no gaps in past, present, or future—only to see one open up in the present, to be sealed as a new unity later on.Footnote ³³

Speaking of “the” narrative, however, elides the real object of Sternberg's method. How do we identify holes before we can even begin sorting them into gaps and blanks? Unlike my example of a w rd that is clearly missing something, in a complex narrative, there is no straightforward set of rules for what is suspenseful or dull, curious or banal, surprising or obvious. Nor is narrative interest purely subjective—if it were, how could we distinguish a thriller from a period drama or (as in Auerbach's Homer/Bible opposition) an epic from a tragedy?Footnote ³⁴ We could keep ducking this question, and sustain the illusion that each narrative comes prepackaged as a coherent whole, by classifying narratives according to generic features. For instance, we could say that history recounts truths, whereas literature invents amusing fictions. If we read, for example, the Akedah as history, then we should find a “strong, clearly demarcated pattern of causation” with little suspense. If we read it as literature, then we should instead be more attuned to its characters' internal development. So say Kugel and Alter. The problem with their holistic approach, from Sternberg's reader-oriented standpoint, is that there is no firm threshold between genres. The Akedah does pursue a linear course of development in time and space, from early in the morning to the top of Mt. Moriah, adhering to simple laws of physical and moral causality. But it also includes singular details—a gesture here, the repetition of a deictic there—with no evident historical referents. If we are interested in such details, we promote their function in the narrative's temporal flow to the status of “gaps”; if we are uninterested, we demote them to “blanks,” meaningless add-ons to a relatively thin original text. Either way, our interpretive ambition never ventures far beyond the circle of our generic assumptions about the text itself, that is, about what kind of story it must tell us.

Sternberg's key insight here is that when Kugel and Alter try to “write off” in advance what sort of interest we should take in the narrative, by falling back on its generic classification, they do not describe how we experience the narrative but only what we are told in the narrative. We can call this the plot or, in Sternberg's Russian Formalist parlance, the szujet. But Sternberg points out that the plot/szujet (what we are actually told) is only half the narrative. The other half (what we are able to say, when the telling is done, really happened) is the story or fabula.Footnote ³⁵ Sternberg challenges us to stop seeing a narrative as a smooth series of more or less artfully told events and start looking at it as a “dynamic system of gaps” between plot and story.Footnote ³⁶ As readers, our interests are directed, not by generic features of the plot in itself, but by the systematic weaving between plot and story as they are knit together over time. If this is happening now, we ask, what else might have happened? And: What might happen next? This dense texture of cruxes and reconstructions he calls narrative exposition. Much of Sternberg's work, especially on the Bible, involves technical analysis of how exposition is handled and how it affects readers.

Sternberg uses his theory of exposition to analyze gaps/blanks in the Bible in three steps, following a more methodical and verifiable process than any that we have considered so far. First, he isolates discontinuities in the narrative where the plot and the story do not coincide. For example, he (like Alter and Auerbach) reads the Akedah as a narrative in which the style gives us only “dim and fragmentary” glimpses of the characters' inner lives, because the narrator tells us so little (in the plot) about what the characters are thinking; he keeps it all in the “background” (of the story).Footnote ³⁷ Next, Sternberg applies his method in order to separate warranted explanations of what we are told but don't know (gaps) from idle speculation devoid of evidence (blanks). This can provide grounds for assessing, for instance, if the Bible's figures are complex, internally conflicted literary “characters.” Returning to our example of the Akedah, we are not told a word about Sarah in the narrative itself, so her feelings would be a blank (contra certain midrashim, piyyutim, and feminist critics). Abraham's feelings, in contrast, are a marked gap; why else, for example, would Isaac heighten our interest by asking, “Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?'” Signals like these give us a warrant to close the gap of what Abraham is feeling by, for instance, assigning a doubled referent and heavy tone to his answer (“Here is the lamb for the burnt offering, my son”). This sort of hypothetical gap closure by the reader helps to intensify one of our primary narrative interests, suspense, while simultaneously adding to Abraham's interiority. Thus the exposition resutures plot to story by mediating between reader's and character's minds.Footnote ³⁸ Finally, Sternberg proposes criteria for delimiting our gap-filling prerogatives, beyond our primary narrative interests. These criteria include logical norms (integrity, analogy, causality), norms of proportion (between minimal and implied readings and, in the latter category, between reticence and significance) and even an all-purpose “quantitative indicator” (more information = more possible significance, whether we are trying to add apparent redundancies, epithets, sotto voce asides, etc. to the “gaps” side of our interpretive ledger).Footnote ³⁹

To complement this sketch of Sternberg's theory of exposition, it may also help to take a look at his theory from a genetic perspective, and not only in order to correct Alan Mintz's suggestion that the Tel Aviv school of poetics (of which Sternberg is a founding father) is a mere “reincarnation” of Russian Formalism (hence, “simply, not new”).Footnote ⁴⁰ Contra Mintz, as careful comparison of Sternberg's terminology with one of its key sources (the Russian Formalist Boris Tomashevksy) shows, much has changed from Moscow to Tel Aviv, both in the specific functions of this terminology and in its underlying conceptual architecture. But more importantly in terms of our theme—epistemological foundations and interpretive warrants in recent biblical criticism—this comparison reveals that the Bible's artful discontinuities were not just a new example to which Sternberg applied an apparatus that he imported from the Russian Formalists. Rather, Sternberg used the Bible's particular stylistic problems, especially its very “gappy” exposition, in order to theorize a more dynamic interplay between the reader and the text than Tomashevsky.

Sternberg's major innovation with respect to Russian Formalism is exposed, typically, in a parenthesis at the end of his first book where he accuses the Formalists of an “(a priori view of the szujet).”Footnote ⁴¹ To clarify this criticism, compare him to Tomashevsky on szujet versus fabula:

Rather than, say, two sides of a sheet of paper that cannot be cut without altering both,Footnote ⁴³ for Tomashevsky, story and plot are just stacked on top of each other. The story is no less a priori than the plot; it exists independently as an ensemble of real-life or imaginary events, while the plot serves only to bring the story to the reader's attention in an aesthetic way. The story is a straight logical-chronological progression; the plot is a partial series of diversions from it. These diversions may be more or less pleasant, of course, but beyond that, Tomashevsky has no clear way to analyze how the two narrative modes are related.Footnote ⁴⁴ For him, whatever makes a narrative effective must be outside the text itself, in its historical and ideological themes (“dominants”).Footnote ⁴⁵

Tomashevsky also takes an a priori attitude towards the smallest undecomposable units of a narrative: “motifs” (e.g. the gun in a murder mystery).Footnote ⁴⁶ Both plot and story contain motifs. They share some but not all; not all motifs in the plot are essential to the story. Exposition works its magic by including some motifs but not others, in strategic combinations, over time. So far, Sternberg and Tomashevsky seem to agree. But again, because he has no formal model for how plot and story are related, let alone a temporal model like Sternberg's, Tomashevsky does not describe the concrete ways in which motifs are arranged in the plot (or, alternatively, “gapped”). Instead he lumps motifs into four categories, according to their relative importance in an arbitrarily abridged version of the story (let's call it the “Cliff's Notes”).Footnote ⁴⁷ He calls a motif “bound” if we cannot take it out without making the Cliff's Notes incoherent (in Chekhov's famous example, the gun in a murder story that must, by definition, be fired), but “free” if it just adds details to the plot (the color of the gun). Similarly, a motif is “dynamic” if it develops the story (the moment when the butler fires the gun), but it is “static” if it fails to spur development (the fact that it is fired in the kitchen). These two sets of motifs are not equivalent: bound motifs are logically necessary, whereas dynamic and free motifs can be compared in terms of their various effects. Thus, Tomashevsky does have an incipient theory of narrative interest and hence of the reader's mind: we could very roughly measure this interest by ranking the contributions of dynamic and free motifs against bound ones along a linear temporal axis. But again, because he has no model for how plot and story coevolve over time, and no clear typology of reader-responses, Tomashevsky does not shed much light on the reader's role in the exposition. Nor does his Cliff's Notes (an artificial baseline for what “really” happens that is then re-presented by the exposition) allow for his readers to reconstruct different versions of the “same” basic story.

To summarize Sternberg's transformation of Tomashevsky's Russian Formalist model: what Tomashevsky seems to have pictured as a spatial model with motifs arranged by positive criteria in relation to an artificial version of the minimal story, Sternberg has turned into a temporal model with motifs arranged by negative criteria in relation to multiple implied readers. In Sternberg's theory, motifs have become norms that set limits to readers' responses to the plot. We should no longer think of the narrative as a fixed sequence of events presented by a fluid set of fictional devices, but as a collaboration (or competition!) between author, narrator, and reader, who strive to actualize the concrete semantic resources embedded in a given sequence of textual information. Recalling a popular series of American kids' books that appeared around the same time, Sternberg's narratology invites us to “choose your own adventure.” For him, how a text regulates the opening and closing of gaps and blanks in our own interests—not a clunky toolbox of formal distinctions between parts or kinds of narration—is the best way to make sense of it. Nor does the author necessarily have the upper hand: just as he can arrange the plot in multiple ways relative to its implicit story, his readers can reconstruct the story in many ways from the fragments of its plot. Thus exploding any conventional dichotomy between fixed “story” and malleable “plot,” Sternberg theorizes them as a single temporal matrix of interpretive potential.

Of course this is just a peek into the mechanics of Sternberg's poetics, a juggernaut which already loomed large in his works of biblical criticism in the 1980s and has since morphed (most dramatically in two series of long articles in the 1990s and 2000s) into an elaborate theory of human mental life that, he argues, both anticipates and surmounts nearly all its followers in narratology and cognitive science.Footnote ⁴⁸ Yet in contrast to Kugel and Alter, Sternberg's contribution is clear. Rather than a reader whose response is limited from the outset by fixed generic features of the narrative, Sternberg theorizes and tests the biblical text against an active reader—a reader who constantly constructs and reconstructs new versions of a protean story from the scraps of information and rapidly changing plot that the author and the narrator have chosen to give him. Further, Sternberg's cognitive universalism assures that we, too, can play this reader's role. Thus he escapes Kugel's dichotomy between the modern objective historian and the primitive biblical audience, on the one hand, and Alter's overly empathic identification of the biblical reader with his own “literary” sensibility, on the other. Still more importantly, Sternberg's theory includes internal criteria for verifying its applicability on a case-by-case basis. We can ask, How would I, the reader, close a gap at this point in the narrative, on the basis of the information I have, in order to fulfill my primary narrative interests? By opening avenues to this question, Sternberg's poetics of biblical narrative often reveals a great deal about how it works without falling into then-ascendant critical trends: neither the fantastical pseudo-objectivity of structuralism nor the ideological bent of many poststructuralisms and postmodernisms. His “reader” is an artificial construct, to be sure, but a construct that can be tested and improved by means of the text itself.

Zornberg's Critique of Sternberg: From Cognitive Science to Psychoanalysis

When we compared Kugel's and Alter's receptions of Auerbach's “background” thesis, the very object of our inquiry threatened to vanish in opposite directions. For Kugel, marked elisions or “gaps” in biblical narrative were mere figments of the modern reader's overactive imagination—“blanks” to be replaced by historical analysis. For Alter, their meaningfulness could be taken for granted as a token of the author's literary art; armed with a standard toolbox, any critic could decode their intended meaning just like the Bible's ancient audiences must have. Neither Kugel nor Alter, then, allowed for a specifiable range of differences between himself and the Bible's implied reader(s) on the basis of a theory of what they certainly share: a human mind.

By contrast, Avivah Zornberg—from a famous rabbinic family in Scotland, originally a scholar of English literature but now known as a Torah teacher in Jerusalem, worldwide lecturer, and author of original biblical interpretation—agrees with Sternberg's general approach: biblical narratives communicate by means of “gaps,” and we can analyze how they do so, if and only if we simultaneously use the Bible to test a model of what sort of mind it is communicating with. When it comes to her own model of the reader's mind, however, Zornberg is quite different. She claims that Sternberg does not allow for a wide enough range of inner experience to the Bible's reader; he unduly constrains the reader's narrative interests to a rational conscious level. She does not actually say, as others have before and since,Footnote ⁴⁹ that Sternberg's ideal reader (even Sternberg himself!) is therefore sexist, crypto-fundamentalist, and obsessed with omniscience or omnipotence, but her criticisms echo each of these well-known arguments in more subtle ways.Footnote ⁵⁰

For our purposes, we only need to follow Zornberg this far: indeed, Sternberg's norm for valid reading is highly rationalist. When we retrace his theoretical footsteps in hot pursuit of gaps in the Bible's exposition, we leave behind our affective, cultural, and otherwise warranted interpretations. Yes, technically, Sternberg has a slot for these in his theory, but in practice, he applies them far less than a familiar series of deductions or recursive inductions: a relentless quest from textual clue to rational hypothesis, followed by textual proof. Sherlock would be a perfect fit for Sternberg's implied reader, although some of us may feel a bit more like Watson.Footnote ⁵¹ In opposition to Sternberg's rationalism, Zornberg makes a case—sometimes rational, sometimes not, but internally consistent at a very different mental level—for a biblical reader with a broader range of interests and capacities. He looked for solutions to the Bible's “gaps” in the conscious mind of a rational reader; she hears the Bible's “blanks” as symptoms of an irrepressible unconscious that she shares with the characters, the rabbis, and maybe you and me.

If the rabbis seem to enter our comparison a bit abruptly at this point, it is simply because we cannot exclude them any longer. Midrash had no special mandate in either Kugel's or Alter's interpretive warrants. In keeping with their basic strategies, Kugel used history to keep midrash distinct from the Bible, whereas Alter adopted rabbinic insights when they happened to agree with his literary-critical readings. But the rabbis are more vocal interlocutors for both Sternberg and Zornberg, who recognize that midrash, like their methods, often uses holes in the biblical text as a starting point for interpretation. By considering how they both relate to midrash, we can see at a glance how inverted their epistemological positions really are.

If Sternberg's method investigates the interaction between the ideal reader and the text, for him, rabbis are the non-ideal reader. He calls midrash “illegitimate gap-filling,” or arbitrarily upgrading blanks to gaps, because it is “sustained by the reader's subjective concerns,” rather than by cognitive universals like curiosity, suspense, surprise, logic, and all the other ways that we find and fill gaps to make sense of the text.Footnote ⁵² For Sternberg, incoherence is a sign of interpretive failure, not of divine truth. Naturally, then, he has little use for rabbis who overread details, mishandle contradictions, ignore quantities and proportions, and project their own world onto the text's. He even implies that by finding a “system at work” in biblical poetics, he will make the text pay greater dividends than midrash ever did.Footnote ⁵³ If anything, Sternberg's ideal reader is not a religious crypto-fundamentalist (as Bal has claimedFootnote ⁵⁴) but a maskil, a rationalist heretic!

Zornberg critiques Sternberg's rationalist reader by noting that his metaphors for valid knowledge of the text seem to be weighted toward just one perceptual modality: vision. For him, Zornberg says, vision is the human equivalent of divine omniscience. By trying to see through the gaps in biblical narrative, his reader shows an “unambiguous enthusiasm for God's omnipotence.”Footnote ⁵⁵ His method is not just a mode of knowledge but also a form of power, one that classifies, dissects, penetrates, and dominates. His desire to see/know the text from a God's-eye view typifies the “Platonic ideal” that Zornberg seems to associate with methodological criticism in general: the quest for a “triumphal and unequivocal master story” that will finally close all the gaps in the text.Footnote ⁵⁶ In a rather ironic aside (considering his efforts to distance himself from the rabbis), Zornberg even says that a midrash by Naḥmanides is “the basis of Sternberg's account” of this transparent master-narrative.Footnote ⁵⁷

Zornberg understands Sternberg's desire to see/know the Bible's master plan, but for her, “there is a sadness about the constant appeal to the eyes.” By instead placing the rabbis at the heart of a vast tradition of biblical reception, she adopts hearing—an internal, embodied, nondominating mode of knowledge—as the ideal posture for the Bible's reader. We should not, however, mistake this for a primarily theological position.Footnote ⁵⁸ As Tamar Ross notes,Footnote ⁵⁹ Zornberg's religious background clearly plays a role in her approach to the Bible, and perhaps she stresses “hearing” because of her Torah teaching in oral settings. But notwithstanding the lack of engagement with Zornberg's work among biblical scholars,Footnote ⁶⁰ I suggest that her cultivation of a particular way of listening to the text is also a direct response to the epistemological problem that we have already seen in Auerbach, Kugel, Alter, and Sternberg: How can we know what biblical narratives don't say? By adopting the stance of an analyst who is receptive to “symptoms” of the Bible's repressed “counter-narratives,”Footnote ⁶¹ Zornberg combines psychoanalysis and midrash to discover unconscious connections between narrative, characters, and reader. Like Sternberg, she focuses on moments when the text does not make sense—because it says too little, too much, or too many contradictory things at once—and she calls these moments of dense incoherence by a familiar name: “blanks.” But unlike Kugel and Sternberg, for whom “blanks” were the result of unwarranted interpretive license, Zornberg suggests that at the navel of biblical readers' collective unconscious, what makes the least sense may be the most symptomatic. For her, incoherence is not a failure—it is the chance to start making a very different kind of sense.

Zornberg's Unconscious: Blocks, Blanks, and Blessing

While a full appreciation of Zornberg's psychoanalytic theory deserves a separate study, especially as she is averse to such scrutiny,Footnote ⁶² we can explore how it emerges from a case study: Jacob's blessing of his children at the end of Genesis.Footnote ⁶³ Jacob's case brings us full circle to the specific formulation of our general problem that all four earlier critics also debated: are people in the Bible “characters” with complex self-reflective interiority, or are they national archetypes whose inner lives were opaque to their original audiences? How can we tell—based on what they do not say, say unclearly, or seem to say too much? Are we overreading these hiccups in the text or might they be symptomatic of deeper psychodynamic processes; processes that transgress individual and collective, literary and historical modes of analysis and force us to go beyond disciplinary boundaries? In short: is Jacob just a “blank,” or is he “fraught with background”?

Zornberg argues that we can indeed find clues to the depths of Jacob's character by probing holes in this parashah. But unlike Alter, who emphasized the author's intention, and Sternberg, who presumed a critically analytic reader, Zornberg's warrant for opening up these implicit meanings relies on an entire community of readers and readings. The tacit premise of all her work is that rabbinic reception of the text—especially of its most problematic passages—unlocks latent psychological dynamics in the text itself, forging new links between its creator(s), readers, and characters. These dynamics are not necessarily subject to critical ratiocination any more than they are to conscious authorial control. Their paradoxes and semantic excesses, their ambiguities and enigmas, oblige Zornberg, with the rabbis, to adopt a radical openness to new ways of identifying and putting back together what seem to be significant discontinuities in the characters' words and actions. For her, these holes in the text force us to recognize the psychic truth of contradiction itself: a truth that thwarts or even subsumes rational analysis.

In Jacob's case, Zornberg uses three key terms to attune us to the psychodynamics of his character: “block,” “blank,” and “blessing.” Each of these terms indexes a different aspect of the contradictions that, together, drive Jacob's personal history and make him intelligible as a psychologically coherent character. Thus, rather than simply oppose Sternberg, Zornberg's approach picks up right where his left off—at the limits of rational consciousness. Specifically, by appropriating his term “blanks” (or, as she also calls it, “blocks”), Zornberg inverts Sternberg's rational method. In place of his stark dichotomy between relevant gaps and irrelevant blanks, Zornberg argues that the Bible's lack of information (“blanks”) and excessive information (“blocks”) are two sides of one psychological coin. Rather than rely on Sternberg's gold standard of cognitive relevance for sorting out this irregular distribution of information, she uses these irregularities in the text to amplify Jacob's inner struggle—without explicit awareness on his own part and with no direct appeal to authorial control. In so doing, she irrevocably blurs the line between, on the one hand, stylistic problems in the text as such and, on the other hand, how the rabbinic commentaries empower their readers to interpret these problems.

The very title of this narrative unit, Va-yeḥi, is Zornberg's first symptom of repressed meaning in Jacob's life story. After all, the story is about the death of a patriarch, but the title refers to his life: and he lived signifies Jacob's quest for closure and fulfillment, a quest not yet concluded. How can we account for this apparent discrepancy? To this traditional interpretive problem, Zornberg adds another. Jacob's death is ultimately codified by the only “living will” in Genesis, a symbolic statement of blessing upon his children and all Israel.Footnote ⁶⁴ Yet at the beginning of the story of his death, on the verge of “‘revealing the end’” (49:1) and blessing his children, Jacob does not actually do so. His inability (“block”) is not clearly marked in the text itself, but she draws it out by using Rashi's midrash on the verse: “the eyes of Israel were heavy with age, for he could not see” (48:10). Lacking foresight, how can Jacob bless the next generation? The “sense of an ending” that will endow his life with meaningful coherence is sorely lacking.Footnote ⁶⁵ Nor does Sternberg's ideal reader (who also prized the metaphor of visionary knowledge) magically appear to clarify this problem for us. It is rooted in something internal to Jacob's own character.

For the underlying psychic etiology of Jacob's “block,” Zornberg again turns to Rashi, who notes that the narrative of Jacob's death is the only parashah setumah: the only weekly Torah reading not introduced in the scroll by the usual minimum nine spaces.Footnote ⁶⁶ Just as Jacob's sight is occluded, then, his vision is literally “blocked” in the text. Connecting this textual block to the context of Jacob's blessing—his sojourn in Egypt—Zornberg treats his “blindness” as an internalized exile; a blocked existential condition. She diagnoses him as suffering from a psychic legacy of slavery in Egypt and therefore unable to bless his family. Citing Auberbach, she calls this trauma the “background” in terms of which his block should be interpreted:

To follow this “block” even more deeply into Jacob's mind, Zornberg draws on the Zohar's proposal that he suffers, not just from a physical lack of vision or speech, but from a lack of imagination—from “failure to read reality as though it constituted an intelligible text.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Thus she redefines Jacob's “slavery” as a psychic bondage, not only a political/national one. His block is now part of a “history” in the medical/psychoanalytic sense, rather than in Kugel's more usual political/national sense. It is a residue of Auerbach's “personal history”: the layers of memory, or the “depths of time, fate, and consciousness” that hover over biblical characters long after the critical events have passed.Footnote ⁶⁹ Zornberg senses the pressure of Jacob's personal history in semantic slippages between how he promises to bless his children and how he actually does. This is the “discontinuity ... that generates the midrashic narrative” and, again, the reason, at the very instant when he reaches out for a meaningful conclusion to his life, that he discovers instead that “the tragic experience of blocking is now his.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Blocked speech, blocked imagination, a personal history of exile and slavery—formidable obstacles to psychic closure in themselves. But finally, Zornberg argues that none of these are inseparable from the deepest block in Jacob's consciousness: his relation to God. She draws from a midrash in which the divine presence (shekhinah) departs from his bedside, leaving Jacob not just bereft of his own sight but even blinded (“blocked”) by its detached radiance.Footnote ⁷¹ This sudden disconnection from the divine runs against everything Jacob has stood for. He is, as Zornberg has said throughout,Footnote ⁷² “concerned with the question of coherence”; he yearns to be “whole, complete ... a life fully used, energies fully metabolized, its parts tending toward integral meaning.”Footnote ⁷³ To explain this existential hole in his biography, Zornberg cites Rambam for what she calls a “clinical psychological diagnosis”: Jacob's pathology has been caused by repressing his anger for Joseph's long absence. This anger returns as God's absence at the end of his life: “Because of Jacob's sorrow and anxiety, during all the days of his mourning for Joseph, the holy spirit departed from him. ... The Sages make the point in this way: ‘Prophecy does not come to rest in the midst of lethargy, or of melancholy ... but only in the midst of joy’” (Rambam).Footnote ⁷⁴

Mirroring Jacob's own internalized exile and slavery, Joseph's enslavement in Egypt has left hidden scars in his father's character that resurface at this moment of frustrated catharsis. Zornberg's diagnosis echoes that of R. Mordechai Yosef Leiner (the Ishbitzer) when she says that Jacob's blessing is blocked by “repressed resentment and suspicion: he is angry with his sons....”Footnote ⁷⁵ In a psychological view of Jacob's inner reality, in fact, there is no essential difference between the Rambam's and the Ishbitzer's readings of why he cannot speak. “God” is a mode of Jacob's relation to himself (his own “wholeness,” shalom). “This is no arbitrary movement of God, present and then absent, but a movement within the intimacies of Joseph's spirit. There, something flickers and goes out.”Footnote ⁷⁶

To review Zornberg's diagnosis of Jacob's problem, perhaps the most striking thing about it is how far she has pushed the limits of his consciousness in search of their hidden dynamics. She began with a symptomatic reading of his inchoate speech, moved onto a case history of his family's exile and slavery, touched lightly on his broken relation to the divine, and ended by equating this to his broken relationship with his own sons. Clearly, for her, Jacob is both more and less than an individual character. In his role as “Israel” he incorporates and plays out unconscious tensions of the whole national narrative up to this point; yet as a dying old man, these tensions have overwhelmed his personal capacity to process them and articulate an ending. Given this simultaneously overdetermined and incoherent character, it follows that as readers, we should not try to interpret Jacob by fixing some Archimedean point outside his story from which to judge and reconcile the inner conflicts that define him, as Kugel, Alter, and Sternberg, each in his own way, would have us do. On the contrary, we must embrace the structure of Jacob's essential contradiction before we can articulate a truly therapeutic response.

Zornberg names this contradiction in appropriately contradictory terms: not only is Jacob “blocked” by too much meaning, he also suffers from a lack of meaning, a parallel pathology that she calls the “blank.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Jacob's inner “blank” and “block” are related as trauma is to symptom: “the experience of the ‘blank’ [is] the model for our understanding of the theme of ‘blocking,’ of the ‘absence of God.’”Footnote ⁷⁸ Zornberg notes that the very words blank and block help us to hear this uncanny coincidence of opposites. “Both blank and black have the same root”; to be “blank” is also to be “black,” “blocked,” obscure, thick with inchoate feeling, “assailed by emptiness or density, unintelligible, like an unreadable page.” As if directly responding to Sternberg's disdain for midrashic blank drawing, Zornberg concedes that “the blank is in the eye of the beholder. But ...” she continues, if the reader can open himself to hear Jacob's melancholia and the self-shattering cacophony of trauma, “... no mere chiding will transform the unmeaning colorlessness/blackness of things.” At the bottom of Jacob's mind—in the “background” that charges his every word with repressed meaning—blank and block are one and the same.Footnote ⁷⁹

Once the reader adopts Zornberg's psychoanalytic commitment to these irreducible complexities of biblical characterization, she should not try to resolve Jacob's problem by applying a historical or literary or cognitive methodology. Having acknowledged the problem's paradoxical etiology, her only authentic response (not necessarily a solution, but still therapeutic) is to repeat Jacob's problem in a way that helps to unstick its most intractable inheritance. To this end, following her diagnosis of Jacob's “blanked”/“blocked” consciousness, Zornberg rereads his deathbed “blessing” on the psychodynamically warranted assumption that it will offer the opposite of blanks/blocks: integration, closure, catharsis, shalom. Just as she used midrashic readings of Jacob's foreclosed speech to palpate his repressed unconscious, midrash will help her to hear Jacob as he works through this blockage. If his trauma had resulted in too much or too little speech, his blessing will articulate a newfound balance.

In this search for the proportion and harmony that will be the sign of Jacob's blessing on Israel, Zornberg, still following the Ishbitzer,Footnote ⁸⁰ asserts that he must transcend his indistinct mass of emotions (“blanks”) to name each of its elements clearly; like Moses's blessing, which begins, “And this is the blessing ...”Footnote ⁸¹ To learn how Jacob can attain “this” clarity (the lucidity of this), she reads forward to the blessing that he eventually does give his sons, fastening onto its fluid imagery: “wine,” “grapes,” and “milk” (Genesis 49:11–12). Her intuition that fluidity and clarity—again, apparent opposites—are the key to Jacob's overcoming of his block/blank then takes her into a long midrash on Ezekiel's “dry bones.” Asking these “dry bones” to “speak” and to “live again” is, she suggests, exactly what Jacob must have asked himself as his blessing flowed forth. By opposing his “water, wine, and milk” to Ezekiel's bones, she suggests that “Jacob's use of fluid imagery is profoundly connected to the question of integration that so troubles him.”Footnote ⁸²

But of course, given that this opposition is generated by the fluidity in Zornberg's own language—she is circling, not just between Jacob and the midrash, but between Jacob and an entirely distinct biblical passage—when she finally integrates the opposition, it is as much a response to her own dialogue with Jacob as it is to his projected inner monologue. His ability to speak clearly to his sons (“and this is the blessing”), is, Zornberg says, “a lucid focus gained, paradoxically, through the medium of the ‘other things,’ the ‘other words,’ that he had to speak, in the ‘blank cold’ of his poetic crisis.”Footnote ⁸³ But these “other words” are none other than Zornberg's; as a sounding board for Jacob's silences, she guides his stuttering transference back to himself. Only then can he speak his “own” words which—thanks to the blocks/blanks that she has found in him—finally voice his solution to “a failure, a forgetting, a blurring of focus.”

This circular movement between the character's and reader's consciousness is what sets Zornberg's psychoanalytic theory apart from the other four that we have examined. In Kugel's historicist approach, the Bible's so-called characters are as simple as their original readers; all the complexity comes from later layers of interpretation. But Zornberg teaches us to read these “later” layers as latent in the intrinsically overdetermined Bible itself (provided that we accept the universality of her psychoanalytic theory). By contrast, in Alter's literary criticism, biblical characterization is an effect of authorial intent; hardly trivial yet tightly contained in the narrative frame as a vehicle for artistic communication, a frame where no less putatively universal aesthetic principles predominate. And in Sternberg's rationalism, the reader gained a more active role in the production of meaning, but this role was still constrained by concrete traces in the narrative, which he saw as signposts guiding the reader's underspecified attention and reactions.

By contrast to all these options, Zornberg has created an interpretive framework where the Bible's characters and readers only become more evolved as they interact, blurring their boundaries and disturbing the premise that the plot/story (rather than, say, the life/death) should be our unit of textual analysis. This fusion of rabbinic tradition with psychoanalysis is informed by her reading of the name ‘Ivri (“Hebrew”) as a “translator” (one who “carries across”).Footnote ⁸⁴ By shirking the sine qua non of methodology (a fixed standpoint from which to objectify the text) she succeeds in creating audible—if not always historically, literarily, or rationally plausible—resonances between what the Bible does not say and what we project onto it. In this sense, she is the most direct heir to Auerbach's “background.” This concept may not describe the characters themselves—who may, everyone admits, remain forever inaccessible to us—but it does describe something about how we want to relate to them. Zornberg's implied reader has been exposed to a reason whose reasons Sternberg's reader does not know: the incessant, transgressive, and potentially transcendent logic of desire.

Yet despite the clear psychological progression that we witnessed in Jacob—from symptoms to trauma towards catharsis—it seems typical of Zornberg's approach that even when he does “reveal the end,” Jacob's children never actually respond to his words. In the last line of her book, he is just about to “merge mystery and meaning, and teach his children to speak themselves toward blessing”Footnote ⁸⁵ ... but the blank page swallows them up. This movement towards dialogue, only to veer away from it at the last moment in favor of an introverted conversation with oneself by way of the other, runs deep in Zornberg's work on the Bible and already in her doctoral thesis from the 1970s.Footnote ⁸⁶ Even as she instructs us to cultivate an attentive sensibility, Zornberg also accentuates a deafening silence, a yawning chasm between her and us. Her audience are not interlocutors but, precisely, auditors, whose “spoken—and even unspoken— responses made it possible for me to discover ... what further might be said....”Footnote ⁸⁷ Perhaps this skepticism as to the possibility of authentic dialogue is the dark side of her theory of the mind.

*****

“Der liebe Gott steckt im einzelnen,” as Aby Warburg used to say. Our dear Lord is in the details.Footnote ⁸⁸ Warburg's aphorism holds equally true for each of these five twentieth-century biblical scholars (more literally for some; more literarily for others). Each scholar, from Auerbach (1946) to Zornberg today, framed a panoramic viewpoint on the Bible's poetics from the angle of one problematic stylistic feature. Further, despite their very different solutions, they shared a general sense of why this feature is so problematic. The Bible organizes information with singular reticence; its words are neither tied together by the smooth hypotaxis of Homer nor broken by the radical syncopation of Gertrude Stein. Rather, biblical characters and events seem to form meaningful connections because of the occult links between whatever is not explicitly told about them. As a way of piquing the audience's interest, of course, such reticence is available to all narrators, but it seems that the Bible's narrators, unlike Homer and more proximal counterparts,Footnote ⁸⁹ were the first to turn it into a full-blown technique. As critics, then, rather than circumnavigate these marked “blanks” by writing them off to textual errors or other tokens of our own historical distance from the Bible's narrators (as did Kugel), maybe we need to integrate them within a more general theory of how the Bible communicates (as did everyone else).

Starting from this shared problem, however, our critics’ solutions diverged. For Kugel, the only real “blank” was our own incapacity to let the Bible be. He would be deaf, for example, to the “suspense” that Auerbach heard in Abraham's silence during the Akedah. To Kugel, the Bible's audience knew Abraham and what he stood for: rather than a dramatic play of words and silence or light and shadow, they experienced his story as a fairly transparent myth. All the more so, then, was Kugel obliged to reject Alter's notion that the subtle interplay between a character's speech and reticence must be artfully controlled, as in the case of Joseph. Whereas Alter gave the Bible a literary author who speaks by means of silence (and expects us to listen), Kugel maintained that Alter, as a literary reader, had learned to hear voices that were never really there.

To overcome this polemic between “historical” distance and modern “literary” nearness, Sternberg introduced an essential new variable: an explicit, verifiable construct of the Bible's implied reader. Instead of objectivist or merely subjective criteria for evaluating whether or not the Bible's omissions are systematically meaningful, Sternberg used this reader-response model in order to compare the concrete effects of omissions (“gaps”) on narrative development. Thus he recovered Auerbach's and Alter's premise that the Bible's reticence may be significant, but he also gave it a clearer functional profile by correlating it to the reader's basic narrative interests. In the process, he even absorbed Kugel's counterclaim that absence of information is not necessarily significant: there is also room for meaningless “blanks” in Sternberg's theory, but their lack of functionality must be proven by their lack of effect on the reader. As Sternberg's credo says, “There are no package deals in narration.” Any categorization that leans too hard on formal, historical, or ideological criteria will fail to describe how a text actually develops as a temporal system of signs and interpretations. In practice, however, by overlaying the narrative timeline with the logical sequence of possible readings, his approach actually put the Bible into a very tight package of narratological tactics. Maybe too tight: Zornberg agrees with Sternberg that the reading process itself is the best guide to biblical poetics, but she does not accept his version of the Bible's implied reader. Rather than reconcile contradictions and seek closure at every turn, Zornberg uses midrash and psychoanalysis to conjure a reader who doubles as a permeable seam where the text and its intertexts can leak, bleed, mingle. It is hard to say what, exactly, governs their alchemical interaction. Yet their dynamics do crystallize more clearly around our shared interpretive problem: a poignant lack or “blank” in Joseph's character. For Zornberg, this blank, like its opposite pole (the “block,” a surfeit of signification), is not an aesthetic device to be defused but a cipher of desire to be pursued in the direction of “blessing”... a cathartic answer from an auditor—divine or human?—who remains strangely mute.

The main goal of this comparison has been to do for each of these scholars what they have done for the Bible itself: to show how their solutions to textual anomalies and their frequent moments of mutual misrecognition arise from their more general interpretive warrants, that is, from basically different things that they consider themselves licensed to seek in the text. Hence it could be called an exercise in biblical “meta-criticism.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Its argument, however, is not limited to this meta-level, as it comes from, and should return to, a series of specific interpersonal and pedagogical encounters with equally complex dynamics. As literary theory for the sake of theory has reached a dead end in my view, and as no meta-criticism is complete without self-criticism, let me conclude by trying, ever so briefly, to specify my own position in these dynamics and by sketching the praxis of theory, that is, the pedagogy, that I hope this essay will reinvigorate.

First, within the field of research on the Hebrew Bible's poetics, I hope that by comparing one's own interpretive warrants to each of these scholars', it will be easier to distinguish more clearly between how we, in our role as readers, establish “the” text for us to interpret in the first place, and what we think this text really says. Of course, in general, these are two points on the same hermeneutic circle. The very assumptions that inform our selection of particular versions, variants, and aspects of the text as evidence (our “interpretive warrants”) are major determinants of its meaning. But there is still a choice to make between three ways that we can deal with this inherent circularity of all interpretation. We can methodologically limit it by circumscribing the text in advance as a particular kind of object; we can ideologically perpetuate it by failing to distinguish ourselves from the text at all; or we can rigorously and recursively objectify the implicit intersubjective dialogue that always motivates what we look for in the text and then—only then—try to sort out this dialogue from what “the” text itself tells us. Naturally these dialogues include (sometimes polemical) scholarly debates between the Bible's lines, and so at a very crude level this helps to keep a lid on personal feuds. But as I have argued, an equally influential and more elusive partner in our encounter with the text is the specter of its implied reader(s), towards whom we may feel beholden or hostile, responsive or inert, often all of these at once. This muted dialogue with the implied reader has a no less profound impact on our own theories of the text than our explicit methodology or paradigm, and often the two do not neatly coincide. For instance, all these scholars (even the defiantly postrabbinic Sternberg) are obliged to entertain the rabbis as one of the Bible's implied readers and they all must position themselves in relation to midrash. Some of their reactions to midrash are conscious and explicit, others much less so, but without drawing the line more clearly, it is difficult to tell who is really arguing with the rabbis and who is arguing with, say, fans of the rabbis in postmodern literary criticism. The biblical scholar often writes alone, but she is always talking to someone; this “someone” is not just whomever she cites but may be an imagined, concealed, collective, historical, or hybrid interlocutor as well. Her chosen text is a product of their conversation, not the other way around.

Translating this into the classroom, perhaps this mode of reflexive intersubjectivity (rather than objectivity or subjectivity) also offers the model for a narrative poetics of the Bible that is better adapted to teaching the Bible as part of an undergraduate humanities curriculum. As an unabashed “amiable Californian in sneakers” (as Kugel calls those of us who still feel that the Bible can be brought alive to students under the rubric of “literature,”Footnote ⁹¹ without necessarily endorsing literary criticism as a freestanding research paradigm), I see this problem as a gap between the specialized debates that drive research and the human interests that bring students to the text. To address this problem, some biblical scholars may try to translate research into teaching; others may skip the research and “give them what they want” by making the text as accessible as possible, perhaps at the cost of problematizing their own simplifications. Recently I have wondered if “what they want” is somewhere between these two options. Perhaps they do want to learn—in an explicit, step-by-step way—how to participate in both the affective and the intellectual experience of great scholars as they encounter the text in dialogue with one another and with many earlier interpretive traditions. A rigorously intersubjective approach to the Bible as narrative communication can help to unpack how this mixed bag of passions and obsessions motivates even the most subtle debates about what the biblical text “is,” let alone what it means.

To that end, my comparison of these scholars does not promote any disciplinary norm for what counts as valid knowledge of the Bible. Instead I try to illuminate the competing commitments that seem to make each of these norms so valuable to their adherents. At bottom, these are human commitments, no matter how rarefied or reified they might seem. Whoever we think the Bible's implied reader is, whatever relationship to her we cultivate, her silent presence mediates our experience of the texts just as much as their authors' intention or their narrative architecture. Precisely because this reader, unlike the text, remains silent—a dark mirror of our desires, ideals, and ambitions—our relation to her is most of all a displaced relation to ourselves. But if this approach takes a certain distance from methodological objectification, it does not entail a relapse into ideological navel gazing. Rather than valorize a particular ideal reader, the practice of its critical poetics, and critical pedagogy, is to assess the fusion and fission between minds of many kinds that this text's dense semantic “background” has generated since long before Auerbach's influential thesis and will continue to radiate long after our own reactions have faded.