Thread by @JoelBaden

#Genesis 43

Joseph’s brothers return

Nothing but a continuation of the previous chapter, and of the J story. Honestly these chapters are a model for what coherent, continuous, consistent biblical writing looks like. And they highlight the incoherence of other passages.

The argument that sometimes pops up, that those of us engaged in literary-historical criticism are simply misunderstanding how ancient literature worked, or judging it through a modern lens, crashes against the rocks of passages like this (and there are plenty of them).

Consistency of narrative claim, of basic plot - who, what, when, where, why, how - isn’t some modern literary concept. We know this because passages like this exist, that display all the consistency we moderns expect from a text.

And we know it because ancient readers - the rabbis, for sure, but even biblical authors themselves - recognized the inconsistencies and contradictions and tried to account for them. They did so with different arguments and priors, to be sure, but they saw the problems too.

Plot consistency isn’t a modern literary phenomenon. It’s literally the basic foundation of how humans experience time and space. We occupy one place at a time, and events happen to us in logical and chronological sequence. That’s not a literary construct. It’s life.

This extended narrative also reveals how deftly biblical authors could portray emotional depth, of which there’s plenty here, from the brothers to Jacob to Joseph. This is actually good writing (which isn’t always true of the Bible).

Scholars who read this lengthy, intricate, emotionally resonant narrative and immediately think “it must be a later text” are engaging in the most common form of orientalism. To assume that the ancient Hebrew authors couldn’t write like this is to reveal one’s cultural biases.