118 - The Narrative Covenant: Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature

The Narrative Covenant: Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature
By David Damrosch
San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1987. 352 pp. $21.95.

Many biblical scholars have not as yet attempted to walk the tightrope between two significant ways of studying the Bible that are now current: the historical-critical approach, which seeks the history and intentions "behind" the text, and the more literary approach, which focuses attention on the literary aspects of the text itself. As a professor of comparative literature and one well-acquainted with historical-critical studies of biblical and ancient Near Eastern literature, David Damrosch walks the tightrope and does it valiantly in this stimulating book.

Specifically, Damrosch seeks to show that the grand narrative literature of the early layers of Genesis (the Yahwist's narrative) and I and II Samuel (the Rise of David, the Ark Narrative, the Court History) were revolutionary literary developments out of an already long history of narrative development in the ancient Near East, centered in the literature of Mesopotamia.

Readers will quarrel from time to time with some of the parallels and allusions that Damrosch uses as evidence for relative dating of sections of Genesis and I and II Samuel. But readers will, at the same time, delight in insights from Damrosch's comparison of Genesis and Gilgamesh or the interplay of law and narrative in the Priestly writer. Overall, the reader will find more cause for delight than quarreling.

Dennis T. Olson
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton N.J.