Orality, Literacy and Video Games
Orality, Literacy and Cultural Memory in Ancient Israel
Biblical scholarship on the historical books of the Old Testament have experienced a sea change in recent years. Although some scholars still investigate the historical veracity of the text, most of the academic work on the Deuteronomistic History recognizes that the history-like narratives are more literary products than eye-witness annals. One recent trend employs theories of cultural memory. Cultural memory examines how societies create and engage social memories of particular events that define their identity and values. Often these memories adhere to particular places, sometimes called sites of memory, which evoke communal responses that connect place and event.[7] This approach to biblical texts resonates with biblical material, while it highlights the socializing effect of the historical content of these books. It also leaves room for the oral engagement with these cultural memories.
Cultural memory provides a more fluid model to describe the production of these history-like texts.[8] Just as emotion plays a role in making events memorable for an individual, for social groups, historical moments tend to be remembered when they are either associated with emotionally charged events or if they form group identity. This can be easily demonstrated in our own context: Gettysburg, the Alamo and Pearl Harbor all evoke emotionally laden cultural responses. Cultural memory affects both how an event is memorialized, and even what events are remembered. This becomes evident when considering how the collapse of the World Trade Center comes to represent all of the tragedies that occurred on September 11, 2001, including the attack on the Pentagon and the crashing of the fourth plane.
When cultural memory is applied to the accounts of Saul and Solomon, the social function of these stories is foregrounded.[9] This approach queries why certain narratives were retained in the cultural memory and how these narratives reflect the authors’ view of social identity and ethics. These engagements with cultural memory, however, including the narratives devoted to Saul and Solomon, utilize an often unacknowledged reading model. Many of them assume that the texts functioned as a form of political or social propaganda to advance the cause of one or another social faction. Too often these analyses ignore the question of how the texts might have been actualized within an ancient community. But if the narratives had a persuasive or socializing function, then it implies that the texts would have had some kind of public function. While a few models address this question, most posit a rather limited public use, such as an elite educational setting or a select group of scribes.[10]
|
|
|
For me these models are still too narrow, and do not adequately address the economic investment of scroll production. In short, they do not answer the simple question, what did the scribes think they were doing when they were putting ink onto vellum? I often find myself pondering what it would have felt like to be a scribe. What would he be wearing and how would the linen or wool fabric of his tunic brush against his skin as he wrote? Where would she be when she was writing? Did he stand at a table? If he sat, what kind of chair did he use? Certainly not on the comfortable office chair I occupied as I wrote this. Did she have to make his own pens and ink, or did someone do that for her? Was the scroll on which he wrote annoying, with its edges endlessly curled up next to his arm as he tried to write an epic history? Was she outside in the light, or inside with need of an oil lamp? In the winter, were his fingers stiff with cold and did the smoke burn his eyes? And how did this embodiment of the scribe wend its way into the text (if at all)? Was the scribe who wrote about Jeremiah’s dirty loincloth, for example, wearing really uncomfortable underwear that day?
While clothing, hunger and malnutrition, disease and heartache, anticipation and fear surely effected these writers, even more significant is that fundamental question: how did the scribes expect such a long history would be used? Writing was an expensive practice in the ancient world. Scroll production took labor, especially for the longer lasting velum versions. Even more expensive and expendable in times of crisis would be education, both then and now. The creation of a scribe of the caliber that produced these scrolls required a certain level of urbanization, economic and political stability, and motivation. These were the Quinten Tarantinos and Coen brothers of the ancient world, and they needed corporate backing to produce their art.
|
|
|
The one thing that can be said with certainty is that the scribes and their patrons did not expect average working people to have their own copies of the biblical scrolls sitting next to their beds or on a nearby shelf so that people could read it silently as an individualized spiritual practice.[11] Lectio Divina was not a thing in ancient Israel. First, most people could not afford a scroll of their own, in their little houses with dirt floors. Second, even if they could afford one, most of them could not read well enough to appreciate the text.
Archaeological evidence indicates that the level of literacy in ancient Israel was rather low.[12] While it may have been slightly higher than in Egypt or Babylonia, where the writing systems were extremely complex, the level of education available to the 90% of the people who were not elites equipped them mainly to execute receipts and sign contracts, at the most. Like today, the contracts themselves would have been drawn up by educated scribes. Even the elites probably had only minimal literacy, and used professionals to read to them and write for them.
Israelite culture then was primarily an oral culture, where writing was secondary. This means that sometimes the written texts recorded oral events (although not verbatim), and sometimes they supported oral performance.[13] For a long time, biblical scholarship has worked under the model of the first function. The prophetic collections, for example, were classically viewed as the record of the prophetic utterances that had been delivered orally. The book of Psalms was a kind of hymnbook, and the laws in a book like Leviticus transcribed the legal decisions made by priestly judges. Less attention has been paid to the function of these long histories as support for oral performance. It is in this area in particular that the intersection with video games provides a new model for interactivity, agency, and immersion with a narrative.
Orality, Literacy and Video Games
Theories on the social significance and function of games goes back long before they were digitized, as far back, in fact, as ancient Greek philosophers. In the twentieth century, Johann Huizinga, and Roger Callois demonstrated that play is an essential element of human existence.[14] It allows us to imagine, theorize, run counter-factual models, or explore competing trajectories. In other words, play is at the heart of the intellectual task. [15]
|
|
|
Many video games include interactive story-telling as an essential part of their game-play. I first became interested in video games because of their narrative potential. In fact, most of the paltry examinations into the intersection of the Bible and video games has focused on narrative: either how video games can provide another vehicle for interaction with the biblical narratives (usually the Gospels), or how games reflect certain biblical themes or content.[16] I came to games wanting to learn how they created mythic narratives in my students. What does it mean to be a “hero” in the gaming world? How do mythical creatures function? What are some classic narrative arcs? And to help me get there, I received a grant to have one of my students teach me how to play contemporary games.
What I found was far more surprising. First, now that gaming is one of my favorite leisure activities, I am beginning to “get” how gamers are not thinking about the elements of the game that so many naysayers fret over. I am pretty sure my joy in killing bosses in Dark Souls will not train me to kill my colleagues at work, even those I find an impediment to my professional quests. But second, I did not begin this work expecting to find a better model for thinking about biblical texts. And yet, it did. My questions about the life of the scribe or the expectations of an audience are not new, but video games have given me a different model for addressing them.[17]
One of the distinguishing features of video games is how they forefront interactivity and agency. All games have some level of interactivity. They are created to elicit interaction between the player and the narrative through a set of rule-based options. To be sure, the level of interaction varies from game to game. An open sandbox game, like Skyrim, differs considerably from a story-driven game like The Stanley Parable, but both expect that the resulting narrative will be a product of the interaction between game and player. The more interaction allowed, often the more repeatable a game will be. The material written by the game designers, authors and coders creates possible paths through the narrative, and can serve as a jumping off point for the creation of new paths they had not expected, sometimes through mods and cheats. As a result, the player experiences varying levels of agency in their interactions with games. I know that when I play Skyrim, I appreciate the fact that one evening I can decide to only focus on the main quests, while on other evenings, I might enjoy exploring a random cave, or breaking into every building in a given town.
|
|
|
Well-written games produce an immersive experience in the game world. I felt delight when I killed the stable owner in Whiterun and stole a horse, which I then rode up into the mountains and along the rivers for a couple of weeks. I delighted in being able to step out of my work anxieties and immerse myself in a land of castles, wolves, and dragons.
Interactivity, agency and immersion mold an audience that is restless with passive approaches to narrative, such as those found in print narrative and even film.[18] This readerly restlessness with print narratives has certainly been felt in traditional educational settings. Video games are blamed for ruining our students’ ability to read, especially texts that require prolonged stretches of attention. Video games, then, become the whipping boy of both our educational failures and our social ills. But what if video games are only making more evident the assumptions of elite education that serve as barriers and gatekeepers to academic success, preserving a society of educated haves and have nots? What if the problem is not in the video games themselves, but in our inability to rethink models of reading to include ones that are interactive, foster agency, and support orality or performance? After all, video games would not be commercially successful if they did not serve a social function.[19]
Lying behind the concerns about video games and reading is the further assumption that literacy is an accurate gauge of education. Academic literacy is further defined as the ability for an individual to read long, complex texts silently, and internalize the content of what was read, (perhaps as information, process, or especially art). On the aesthetic level, the ability to appreciate literary art is valued by our educational systems over the appreciation of aural, oral, or visual arts. More money is spent on reading and writing education than on the visual arts, music, athletics, or technical skills. This focus on reading education was essential in a society where the global transmission of knowledge depended on texts: books, manuals, memos, contracts, history. Texts also supported colonization, a fact as true for ancient Rome as it was for the British Empire. Cicero invented standardized Latin in order to ease communication throughout the Roman Empire. The history of standardized English is equally tied to political colonization and the development of a global economy.[20]
Putting aside the question of whether the expectation for such a high level of literacy is actually reasonable or even equitable, however, the contemporary reality is that in the “digital age” the type and level of literacy is in fact changing. While many in this audience probably bemoan this change, as an historian of ancient culture, I seriously doubt that there is a necessary connection between the number of those with aesthetic literacy (meaning the ability to read and appreciate texts as art) and the cultural agility, nay even productivity of a given society. My proof lies in the biblical texts before us this evening, works of considerable artistry that have had an unparalleled effect on Western culture for centuries, produced within a society with low levels aesthetic literacy.[21]
Like ancient Israelites, many of my students have the necessary level of functional literacy, but they have a higher level of visual and aural aesthetic literacy than textually based material. In English, they can consume, remember, utilize, analyze and appreciate mixed media of film and oral presentation as well as music, spoken word, and Ted talks, more than they can textbooks, training manuals and written instructions. In part, this is because multi-media engage multiple intelligences simultaneously which aids learning, but it is also because, even when everyone read “great literature” as part of a legislated curriculum, few went on to do so as leisure activity, and even fewer went on to produce it.
My students come to my class having had very few opportunities to engage biblical texts as sites for interaction, agency or immersion. They rarely see themselves in the narratives. Saul is not their avatar, and the story is not a site of evocative cultural memory or play. I suspect this is the case for many of us in this room. I was trained to read biblical texts as a corpus to be read, internalized, repeated, and perhaps imitated. As someone elite enough to have access to the academic study of the Bible, I was also taught to analyze the texts, even if that precluded certain types of questions. I had the ability, as someone who excelled in aesthetic literacy, to bring those skills to the biblical text, but have grown increasingly aware that most people either do not have that opportunity nor that model of reading at their fingertips…Or do they? In what ways does digital gaming actually equip them with a reading model closer to that of the ancient world?
THE ORAL PERFORMANCE OF ANCIENT TEXTS
The reading model of the ancient biblical texts has changed in recent years. Recently there has been a small but growing field of performance studies of biblical texts,[22] and in many ways, this evening’s analysis contributes to this field. Most of the studies so far have focused on texts where the performative element is rather explicit, such as poetic and prophetic texts. Many prophetic texts allude to an oral setting of their material, and many poetic texts were meant to be sung.
But there has been little focus and even less consensus on the performative aspect of long historical narratives, like the Deuteronomistic History, where we find these stories of Saul and Solomon. Why was this long history created and how was it used? A variety of reconstructions have been proffered, from exaltation of Josiah during the Monarchic period, to imitation of Greek histories some three hundred years later.[23] Many scholars read the stories of Saul and David as cyphers for feuding Jewish groups in the Persian Period,[24] without adequately addressing how the material might have been performed.[25]
This explanation for a text’s production also does not adequately explain how that text continued to function beyond that particular historical moment, especially within an oral culture. If texts functioned in support of oral performance, then a physical text would have never been produced if the oral performance sufficed for a limited function tied exclusively to a discreet historical moment. Furthermore, the scroll would not have been copied multiple times over the course of time, if its material had ceased to be relevant.
Performance models matter. If we imagine a scribe standing before some kind of assembly (whether that be educational, religious, political) reciting the words on the scroll exactly as they occur, in the order in which they occur, then we are not dealing adequately with its function in a primarily oral culture, one in which the expectation is that the text does not exist until it takes oral shape, just as the script of a play is not the play itself. What if the audience expected that the performance of “Saul, the Mad King” used the text as a springboard for the live performance, and that those actualizing the material no more had the text in front of them than Daniel Day Lewis had in Lincoln? What if the text did not dictate how the story was scripted, but rather served as a basis for the material’s performance? How would that change how contemporary audiences see themselves in relationship to the text? Would it lead to an interactive experience of what has been viewed as an overly and overtly static artifact, one that would invest the reader with agency? Can a text be a site of play?
HISTORICAL SETTINGS AS SITES OF PLAY
What does it mean to approach the narratives of the reigns of Saul and Solomon as sites of play? To be sure, these sites of cultural memory[26] are evocative,[27] but in what way does the evocation invite play? When I enter the narrative space of the account of Saul’s reign, how does the historical narrative setting affect my playful engagement with the text? These questions build on literary analyses which note that meaning results from dialogue between text and reader.[28] My focus this evening is how the reading of historical narrative parallels the function of historical settings in games like Skyrim and Assassin’s Creed.
Biblical scholars have applied the concept of spatiality, as defined by Soja, Lefebvre and Tuan to biblical descriptions of space.[29] This has been especially helpful with texts that engage places in an explicit way, either through narrative spaces, such as the descriptions of Eden in Genesis 2, or through visionary spaces, like the description of an ideal temple in Ezekiel 40-48. These analyses have uncovered the ways in which these narrative spaces encode elements of social hierarchy and engage an ancient ethic.[30]
Less focus has been paid to chronology as creating a narrative space, if you will.[31] The fact that the author places Solomon in and around the royal court not only activates a geographical place as a site of memory, but this court is contextualized within a series of events that imbue that site with added cultural significance. These spatial and chronological elements play an essential role in the text’s evocative character that renders the text a site for creative theological play.[32]
When I look to popular video games, I am struck by the number that engage historical spaces. In The Talos Principle the player is a robot wandering through ancient landscapes. Critics praise Assassin’s Creed for its attention to historical detail. Civilization V pits iconic historical leaders against each other. Engagement with the past is so prevalent that there is now a website called “Playing the Past” dedicated to historical games of various platforms.[33] While games do have the potential to educate people about the past, the popularity of a game like Skyrim parallels the level of popularity and cultural impact of a biblical cultural memory that eventually found its way onto a scroll.[34]
What I find interesting is how often games that play with the past engage monarchic structures of one sort or another. Whether it is World of Warcraft or Skyrim, gamers clearly love the look and feel of a game that elicits an ancient monarchy.[35] To be sure, these games explicitly distance themselves from any attempt to read them as recreations of the past, in part through magical and hybrid characters and avatars, but this brings the point even more to the fore. If these games are fantasy, then why do they engage tropes associated with a particular historical period? Would WOW or Skyrim feel the same, have the same aesthetic or the same gameplay if they were set in, say, contemporary Minneapolis or Austin?
Skyrim is not primarily political propaganda. Most gamers do not play Skyrim because they want to overturn American democracy and return to a monarchic political structure. In fact, there is not much overt critique of social, political or economic culture in Skyrim. There is certainly rivalry; it is a game, after all, and the fights must reflect some kind of conflict. But sometimes the enemy is not a rival faction, but the mythical dragons.[36] In fact, the hallmark of the game is that it is enjoyable in its non-combative narrative spaces. The landscapes that the player can explore are rich, complex, and engaging. When I was riding my horse throughout the land, I became annoyed at the wolves that were supposed to elicit gameplay, and chose to simply gallop off the beaten path to avoid the combative element of the game. And, I have to admit, I’ve avoided more than one duel by running away while my Thane battled some embodiment of evil. I like the game’s division of urban, rural and wild areas, spaces which are signaled by the presence of royal forces policing certain roads or the sight of looming walls of larger cities. If I were to run across King Saul in a town named Mizpah on my journeys, I would feel no break in the continuity of the game. If instead of placing Saul in Skyrim, readers take the attitude of play to the narratives of King Saul, the effect on how they view themselves as readers and Saul as subject would be multiple and palpable.[37] Let me start with an example so obvious, it is usually invisible.
I was going to start this paragraph with the sentence, “When the reader first meets Saul...” But the phrase “first meets” assumes that the text of 1 Samuel should be read in linear order. This model of reading works if the scroll is the primary vehicle for the actualization of the text, that is, if we are imagining an individual rolling out the scroll from right to left, giggling with delight or shaking with anger as each episode literally unfolds (or unrolls). But individual reading like that was not the norm. The linear model of reading would also work if we imagine that the primary actualization of the text came through someone reciting the scroll to an audience. This model would have to happen over an extended period of time. Later we have some evidence that this was how the text came to be used in synagogues, during the Greco-Roman period when writing became a more widespread means of communication. But it is not at all clear to me that, when the scroll was created, the expectation was that someone would read it out verse by verse (which, by the way, were not invented yet) to a passive audience.
In an oral culture, it is more likely that the scribe expected that the stories he places there could legitimately be actualized in any number of ways. I would expect that this would change depending on the audience, and I would not be surprised if the reactions of a given audience influenced which episodes were told and in what order. One of the remarkable elements of the stories of Saul and David are the multiple versions of events that 1 Samuel contains. The most glaring of these is the killing of the mythic Goliath, performed by an heroic David in 1 Samuel 17 but by a chap named Elhanan in 2 Samuel 21:19.[38] Similarly, Saul’s portrayal contains both overtly positive accounts and extremely negative episodes.[39] If the model of actualizing the text depends on the expectation of play and interactivity on the part of the audience, then the variations make perfect sense. They provide optional branches from a main narrative line that create opportunities for interactive actualization based on the agency of performer and audience.
Both Skyrim and the texts about Saul and Solomon play with common tropes.[40] The game, for example, utilizes many cultural assumptions: that guards talk briskly, some monks are silent, kings can be lazy, and spies should not be trusted. In Skyrim, the weapons are swords and not pistols. This is not a nod to realism, because the swords can have magical powers and can sometimes be conjured out of thin air. Pistols are replaced by fire shooting out of the palms of characters’ hands. But pistols are not utilized because they evoke a different historical trope that does not work in the playground of this particular monarchic setting.[41] So their function is retained through a different visual representation, now connected to the magical elements of the trope.
The biblical portrayals of Saul and Solomon also play with expected tropes. This is perhaps best illustrated by juxtaposing the most positive portrayal of Saul in the book, his search for his father’s livestock, with the most negative one, his consultation with a medium.[42] In the story of Saul as a younger man living with his father, Saul sets off to find some of his father’s livestock that have wandered off. The story is filled with minor characters who move the narrative along, including Saul’s own servant who suggests they ask a seer where the livestock can be found, girls that they meet at the city’s well who point them to the proper seer, Samuel, and the elite townspeople at the sacrificial feast. It is here that Saul interacts with the prophet Samuel who, later, secretly anoints him to be the next king of Israel. The portrait of Saul in this story triggers certain expectations of the reader. His statement in verse 5 that he does not want his father to worry about him characterizes him as devoted, dutiful and diligent. While contemporary scholars have read this positive portrayal as a reflection of the perspective of a Persian Period Benjaminite group, the episode more explicitly serves the trope of an unexpected rise to power.
Just like minor non-player characters in Skyrim, minor characters in this episode also play with expected tropes. Saul’s servant is wiser than his master, clearly in control of the coin purse![43] The girls at the well are the town’s source for news and gossip.[44] Saul’s father is distant, while his uncle plays the mentor. But it is the character of Samuel that factors most into the narrative play. His role as prophet elicits certain expectations in the audience. The Deuteronomistic History provides a rich tableau of prophets, some of whom are brave and reliable, like Elijah, but others who are less than honorable, scary even. For the DH, then, prophets were powerful social figures who could destroy people as easily as they saved them.
Saul’s youth plays into the encounter between him and the prophet. He neither knows who Samuel is, nor fears him. He blithely takes his servant’s money thinking he is embarking on a simple quest. Perhaps he assumes that Samuel is a non-player character, like the girls, from whom he need only gather information to help him in his main quest to find the livestock. Little does he know that his encounter with Samuel will utterly change the direction of his quest. Samuel will turn out to be the main enemy who will defeat the hero. In this way, Saul’s initial encounter with Samuel becomes his rite of passage from naïve youth to reluctant leader and finally to jaded monarch.
The placement of the story at the beginning of Saul’s story on the scroll of Samuel does not necessarily mean it should be performed first. The chronological arrangement of the Saul narratives makes the story easy to find in a textual world bereft of word searches and indices. Within a performative context, it could be actualized in a variety of ways.[45] It could function as a flashback, for instance, or even be skipped all together without hurting the narrative flow. When the concept of play is applied to the text, other interpretive possibilities arise. It could be actualized in a way that highlights elements of the narrative that subvert its own meaning. Saul’s silence at the end of the chapter, which functions in a linear narrative as foreshadowing his mortal insecurity as an adult,[46] can also serve as a hinge to link a flashback to the main narrative arc. Stories can be expanded, as the rabbinic literature alone demonstrates. This story of teenage Saul could serve as a launch-pad for other boyhood exploits. It could be mirrored more intentionally with a similar story involving Jonathan, such as his single-handed capture of the Philistine garrison.[47] As play, then, the audience can interact with this episode as a straightforward loyal son story, or the performer could actualize it with a sly wink to the audience, thus evoking a different relationship between text and reader.
Samuel predicts Saul’s demise in chapter 28, where the author pulls out all of the stops to give an unrelenting negative portrayal of a king who has lost divine favor. Although this scene begins rather positively, at least for the Deuteronomistic Historian, with Saul’s criminalization of certain spiritual practices, he becomes a criminal himself by breaking his own law, and does so by engaging in practices that this particular historian disdains. As soon as Saul breaks his own law, the trope of a king who thinks he is above reproach is set in motion, and the audience expects that they will be delighted when he is caught in his own net.[48]
This narrative is particularly effective in its ability to elicit a mood. Samuel’s death has led to Saul’s desperation to find a prophet or medium who can still communicate with God. God’s silence drives the king to don a disguise and sneak to a professional necromancer who can conjure the spirit of the dead prophet. The medium is successful – Samuel appears and delivers an oracle – but it predicts Saul’s death on the battlefield and the demise of his dynasty.
Although other parts of this longer history decry the use of mediums who consult with the dead, here the woman who plays the part comes across as a rather tragic figure. The text casts her as someone without power. As someone whose occupation has become illegal, she risks the death penalty if caught exercising her professional role (and the ritual elements in the conjuration signal her professional status).[49] As a woman alone in a house, she would also be at risk for physical harm at the hands of this large, imposing warrior who enters into her space, engaging tropes around gender. Once she successfully conjures the spirit of the dead Samuel, she also risks whatever curses and prophecies the dead spirit could hurl her way.
This focuses attention on the third major character in this episode: the dead Samuel who can still utter prophecies that carry all the weight of power and fear that they did when he was alive. Even from the grave Samuel is coded as more powerful than any living prophet. As a dead spirit he cannot be slain; he is an unbeatable enemy. The encounter between Saul and Samuel again marks a turning point in the narrative as Samuel now becomes the spirit who will usher Saul into the world of the dead.
The interplay of religious and spiritual forces in this chapter are certainly evocative. They function within a web of texts that present Saul as spiritually sensitive, but whose abilities render him vulnerable to spiritual attack rather than prophetic effectiveness. As a reader, I can play with a variety of texts that convey Saul’s turbulent relationship to prophetic power. He is said to be “among the prophets” twice in the narrative, but once it is a positive sign of his future reign and once it indicates what we would code as madness.[50] He is sensitive to spirit possession, both good and evil, calm and murderous. Here he manages to conjure the spirit of Samuel, with some professional help, of course, but this last apparition guarantees his demise. In this engagement of the prophetic trope, Saul embodies the dangers and terrors of prophetic power.
Although these connections among the stories of Saul’s interactions with the spirit world work in a linear reading of the text, the text encourages readers to engage the material in a non-linear fashion. When I was in graduate school, this literary structure was described as a chiasm where the beginnings and endings mirrored each other.[51] But what I am suggesting today is that a chiastic reading is one that makes little sense on a scroll where the reader has difficulty re-reading structures that run over the course of many columns and even across the span of two separate scrolls, such as 1 and 2 Samuel. It makes more sense that these texts were preserved in this way to reflect that the interconnections among various scenes could be realized in a variety of ways. Scrolls could not have hyper-texts, story trees, or sandbox choices. The iterative form of the text invites the audience to wonder whether, if the author of Samuel had the technology, would he have created a Skyrim version of Saul’s narrative? In the ancient world, the oral performance of the material provided the space for interaction among storyteller, narrative and audience, as agents in the narrative flow.[52]
The texts related to Solomon had a different arrangement on the scroll of Kings.[53] While the Saul stories were arranged chronologically so that they are easier to locate, the Solomon narratives modify the chronological arrangement. It starts with his ascent to the throne but then groups his royal actions into those that elicit exaltation followed by those the author considers sinful.[54] Even within this schema, however, the text provides opportunities to forego the linear arrangement of the material and adopt an iterative reading strategy. The account of Solomon’s ability to determine the true mother of an infant provides one example of this narrative technique.
Within the context of a linear reading of the material, the story illustrates Solomon’s great wisdom by depicting him as a wise judge, thus engaging a different set of royal tropes. The reader assumes that the text exalts Solomon’s wisdom because this wisdom has been granted by God earlier in the chapter. As king, he preserves justice throughout his realm, even if it means becoming personal arbiter of a difficult case. In this instance, however, his means of offering to settle the case are rather shocking. Two sex workers, who live together and both of whom have given birth within weeks of each, approach Solomon to decide a custody case. One of the babies had died when his mother smothered him in her sleep. Both mothers claim that the surviving baby is theirs. Solomon offers to split the baby in two and give each half to the mothers, knowing that the real mother would rather give up her child than see Solomon’s gruesome decision enacted. The story if meant to illustrate Solomon’s wisdom, but the resulting aroma, which may code him as wise, does so with hints of ruthlessness.
When the scene is put in play with other episodes in the exploits of Solomon, the reader sees connections with the ruthless Solomon who slaughtered every single one of his opponents under the pretense of loyalty to his father. His reliance on his own cleverness in the story of the women silently attests to his non-reliance on God or prophetic revelation, a theme picked up in the last section of the narratives which depict him as willing to sacrifice religious fidelity for political alliances. Again, these texts pertaining to Solomon, even though they are shorter and arranged more coherently than the stories of Saul expect that the audience will have a non-linear engagement with the material. And I have not begun to examine how these texts relate to other material in the rest of the book of Kings, in the book of Judges, or even in the accounts of David.[55]
Although these texts have been preserved in a way that shows that they expect to have been actualized on a variety of ways, there are certainly many differences between the expectations of engagement with video games and with biblical texts. Many people might assume that the main difference is the seriousness of the Bible versus the trivial meaning of a game, but this distinction does not actually affect how someone approaches the material printed on the page. For me, one of the most significant differences is the expectation of an individual engaging video game material (or at least an individual reacting to other individuals in MMORPGs) as opposed to the communal setting of an ancient text’s actualization. Just as my game play might change if I am being watched by someone else, how much more so would this be the case if the player’s interaction with the text was the product of group reaction or consensus. And it is here that I think my students have the most difficulty bridging the gap between the biblical world and our own. They assume that they are free agents entitled to their personal views and interpretations, thus rendering invisible the social forces that shape those interactions. The biblical world assumed a communal understanding of texts and their meaning, rendering invisible the role of individual agency and genius.
And it is this last point that I think makes the engagement of game theory and biblical studies so potentially transformative. The application of games as rule-based narrative requires the audience (player or reader) to ask themselves who they are in relationship to the narrative or game. When I play Skyrim, I enter the game space through an avatar. In this game, I have considerable choice as to my social location, political faction, physical look, etc. I even have the choice to play in the first person or the third, a viewpoint that can change at any time within the game. Even in third person, however, the point of view is that of my avatar. There is no action except that which I either personally experience or is narrated to me either through speech or text. I become an active player in the monarchic world, as if I could travel through time into a virtual world of castles and dragons, which is one of the great appeals of the game.
Who am I when I read the narratives of Saul and Solomon? That is a completely ambivalent question, and it is this very ambivalence that I maintain makes the text more like playground. The text at hand comes to the reader through a third person narrator. As reader I am like the silent audience watching a film. But the divine elements in the text, God’s unembodied voice, the spirits possessing a defenseless Saul, evoke a level of virtuality more appropriate for first person experience. Empathy for Saul comes from an audience who understands that he was not in full control of his actions. The threat of hubris embodied by Solomon derives from the awareness that if God told us we were exceedingly wise, that we too might use it reprehensible ways. Each ancient actualization of the text engages the audience, whether ancient or modern, in different ways, draws them into the narrative through the manipulation of familiar tropes and the evocative role of compelling characters.
HISTORY AS METAPHOR
I began this talk with the assertion that engagement with video games makes us better readers of historical biblical texts. While I might not have convinced everyone in this audience to go home and play Skyrim before reading the Bible, I do hope that I have shown that interaction with video games has more connections with the ancient audience’s experience of their historical narratives than it might appear. First, in terms of content, the historical settings in both narrative settings engage cultural memories in a rich and evocative way. They invite audiences to enter a virtual, imagined space, and to place themselves within these active sites of memories. Second, the relationship between text and oral performance, narrative and game, present new opportunities for a reader to approach a text that mediates text and performance. This feature of the text allows the audience to approach the text through the lens of play. It suggests that we let go of our overly-linear models of reading, and enjoy the circular, scroll-like investigation of text, hyper-texts and narrative links. Third, an attitude of play results in an interactive appropriation of biblical material, an interaction which literally brings the text to life through the interaction of text and reader. Fourth, the reader becomes an agent in creating the story within the rules set by the text, the trope, and the reading community. The agency works through the appropriations of these socially constructed cultural memories. The reader is both free and confined, individual and collective. Reading becomes an activity, a conversation, in short, an invitation.
In conclusion, our liturgically based passive reading of these texts often distances contemporary audiences from the narratives, which have become stories about a long ago past that sit in judgement on our contemporary world. No wonder such a reading model no longer fills the pews. What gamers want today, what I want today, is the thrill, frustration, joy and anger of being part of the narrative. I want to feel empowered to make the story my own, to speak to it, and let it speak to me. While the greatest preachers and teachers among us already do that, what I am suggesting is that the next generation will teach us how to read biblical texts in a way that is truer to their original setting, as an interplay between text and performance, individual and community. In doing so, our students have the potential to re-vitalize how biblical narratives can function as narrative playgrounds that invite the audience to create theology through their interactions with the text.
To end the talk this evening, I would like to share with you one way that I have played the story of Saul. I play with texts through poetry. Lately my poems play with the question, what would these biblical characters look like, if they were students in my class. For me the iconic moment in the Saul narrative is the scene of his death. He is wounded and begs his armor-bearer to kill him. When the lad refuses, Saul kills himself. His death reflects his tortured life.
The Tragedy of Saul
Saul hopes he goes unnoticed,
His skyscraper body
In knitted cap and hunched shoulders
An insufficient disguise,
Slinking past my podium.
He sits among the backpacks,
The detritus of my classroom horde.
Saul rests his head
On his hand
As class rages around him.
Kill me now, his eyes plead,
Every night a futile quest for peace,
Every morning another fated battle.
He longs for a sword to fall on.
Saul’s demons speak in a cacophony of voices:
Haunted friend;
Eye-rolling teacher;
Disappointed father;
Angry mother.
He asks for exorcism,
But only finds psychiatrists
Pronouncing sentence:
You will never succeed.
Some call me a witch
But I see what no one can,
The path that eludes him,
His own shaded brilliance
That he cannot fathom.
I watch his face
as demonic squatters occupy his head
ghosts of failures past.
I want to touch his cheek,
Draw them out,
Evict them,
But all I can do is prepare a meal
And share his terror
In my safe kitchen,
While the demons assault him
And me.
[1] I would like to thank Mike Best for his work on this project with me. This paper is part of my contributions to the project.
[2] 1 Chronicles states that one of the reasons that Saul died on the battlefield was because he consulted a medium in 10:13, but it does not preserve the whole account.
[3] 2 Chronicles 1 recounts Solomon’s acquisition of wisdom but does not include this story which DH uses to illustrate his wisdom.
[4] On the place of the books of Samuel within this collection, see most recently the volume edited by Cynthia Edenburg and Juha Pakkala, Is Samuel among the Deuteronomists? Current Views on the Place of Samuel in a Deutereonomistic History (AIL 16; Atlanta: SBL, 2013).
[5] Alison L. Joseph, Portrait of the Kings: The Davidic Prototype in Deuteronomistic Poetics (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015).
[6] Steven L. McKenzie, “Saul in the Deuteronomistic History,” pp. 59-70 in Saul in Story and Tradition, ed. by C. S. Ehrlich and M. C. White (FAT 47; Tübingen: Morh Siebeck, 2006).
[7] Niels Peter Lemche studies the temple as a site of memory for the reign of Solomon in “Solomon as Cultural Memory,” pp. 158-81 in Remembering Biblical Figures. For contemporary sites of memory, see Catherine Ann Collins and Alexandra Opie, “When Places Have Agency: Roadside Shrines as Traumascapes,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 24 (2010): 107-18.
[8] I find particularly helpful the essay by Stuart Weeks, “Literacy, Orality, and Literature in Israel,” pp. 465-78 in On Stone and Scroll: Essays in Honour of Graham Ivor Davies (BZAW 420; Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2011).
[9] For a study of the historiographical elements in the books of Samuel, see Rachelle Gilmour, Representing the Past: A Literary Analysis of Narrative Historiography in the Book of Samuel (VTSup 143; Leiden: Brill, 2011).
[10] K. L. Noll, “Is the Scroll of Samuel Deuteronomistic?” pp. 119-48 in Is Samuel among the Deuteronomists?. Noll claims that these histories were created by scribes in the spare time, and that tidbits of cultural memory became fodder for poems and narratives (141).
[11] On the anachronistic models of reading in contemporary biblical scholarship, see Daniel Boyarin, “Placing Reading: Ancient Israel and Medieval Europe,” pp. 10-37 in The Ethnography of Reading ed. by J. Boyarin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
[12] The debates about the level of literacy has grown considerably in the past decade. These include Susan Niditch, Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996); David M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Karl van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Raymond Person, The Deuteronomic History and the Book of Chronicles: Scribal Works in an Oral World (AIIL 6; Atlanta: SBL, 2010); Christopher Rollston, Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel: Epigraphic Evidence from the Iron Age (Archaeology and Biblical Studies 11; Atlanta: SBL, 2010); as well as the essays in Philip R. Davies and Thomas Römer, eds., Writing the Bible: Scribes, Scribalism and Script (Bible World; Durham: Acumen, 2013) and in Brian B. Schmidt, ed. Contextualizing Israel’s Sacred Writings: Ancient Literacy, Orality, and Literary Production (AIL 22; Atlanta: SBL, 2015).
[13] See the options discussed by Weeks, “Literacy, Orality, and Literature.”
[14] Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1950); Roger Callois, Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1961; original, Les jeux et les hommes, 1958); and Man and the Sacred, trans. By Meyer Barash (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959; original, L’homme et le sacré, 2nd ed. 1950 with 3 added appendices.). For a discussion of their relevance to video gaming, see Thomas S. Henricks, “Play and Cultural Transformation – Or, What Would Huizinga Think of Video Games?” pp. 14-34 in Utopic Dreams and Apocalyptic Fantasies: Critical Approaches to Researching Video Game Play, ed. by J. T. Wright, D. G. Embick and A. Lukacs (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010). For an overview of philosophical engagements with play, see Graeme Kirkpatrick, Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2011).
[15] Adam Chapman, “Privileging Form over Content: Analyzing Historical Videogames,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1:2 (2012): n.p.; “Affording History: Civilization and the Ecological Approach,” pp. 61-74 in Playing with the Past; and “Is Sid Meier’s Civilization History?” Rethinking History 17 (2013): 312-32; Sebastian Domsch, Storyplaying: Agency and Narrative in Video Games (Narrating Futures IV; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013); Rolfe Daus Peterson, Andrew Justin Mille and Sean Joseph Fedorko, “The Same River Twice: Exploring Historical Representation and the Value of Simulation in the Total War, Civilization and Patrician Franchises,” pp. 32-47 in Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History, ed. by M. W. Kapell and A. B. R. Elliott (New York/London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
[16] In the field that covers Bible and popular culture, where the handful of studies that mention video games can be found, the focus is on parallel content; see, for example, the essays in Philip Culbertson and Elaine M. Wainwright, eds., The Bible In/And Popular Culture: A Creative Encounter (SBL Semeia Studies 65; Atlanta: SBL, 2010). There is growing exploration of the intersection of religion and digital media, but rarely do they engage the intersection of the Bible and video games. See, Vincent Mosco, The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Craig Detweiler, ed., Halos and Avatars: Playing Video Games with God (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010); D. Brent Laytham, iPod, YouTube, WII Play: Theological Engagements with Entertainment (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012) William Sims Bainbridge, eGods: Faith versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Heidi Campbell, Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds (London/New York: Routledge, 2013); Mary Hess, “Digital Storytelling: Empowering Feminist and Womanist Faith Formation with Young Women” pp. 169-82 in Media, Religion and Gender: Key Issues and New Challenges ed. by Mia Lövheim (Media, Religion and Culture; London/New York: Routledge, 2013); Robert Geraci, Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second Life (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
[17] For a similar approach to the methods of philosophy, see Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox, Philosophy through Video Games (New York/London: Routledge, 2009).
[18] On a similar interplay with film, see Rachel Wagner, “The Play Is the Thing: Interactivity from Bible Fights to Passions of the Christ,” pp. 47-62 in Halos and Avatars. On the need to relate the gospel message in a way that engages younger generation, see Daniel White Hodge, “Role Playing: Toward a Theology for Gamers,” pp. 163-75 in the same volume.
[19] At the end of their book, Cogburn and Silcox point out that how people spend their leisure time indicates what they value; for them this demonstrates the cultural significance of video games (Philosophy through Video Games [London/New York: Routledge, 2009]).
[20] There have been a number of studies of racism in video games, such as Jessie Daniels and Nick Lahone, “Racism in Video Gaming: Connecting Extremist and Mainstream Expressions of White Supremacy,” pp. 85-99 and Joel Ritsema and Bhoomi K. Thakore, “Sincere Fictions of Whiteness in Virtual Worlds: How Fantasy Massively Multiplayer Online Games Perpetuate Color-Blind, White Supremacist Ideology,” pp. 141-54 both in Social Exclusion. See, for example, Jessica Langer, “The Familiar and the Foreign: Playing (Post)Colonialism in World of Warcraft,” pp. 87-108 in Digital Culture; Emily Joy Bembeneck, “Phantasms of Rome: Video Games and Cultural Identity,” chap. 5 PAGES in Playing with the Past.
[21] David M. Gunn, The Fate of King Saul: An Interpretation of a Biblical Story (JSOTSup 14; Sheffield: JSOT, 1984).
[22] See, for example, Robert D. Miller, Oral Tradition in Ancient Israel (Biblical Performance Criticism 4; Eugene: Cascade, 2011) and “The Performance of Oral Tradition in Ancient Israel,” pp. 175-96 in Contextualizing Israel’s Sacred Writings; Kelly Wilson, “A Performance-Critical Analysis of Lamentations,” Ph.D. dissertation, Catholic University of America, 2013; and Marvin Lloyd Miller, Performances of Ancient Jewish Letters: From Elephantine to MMT (JAJSup 20; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015).
[23] It is impossible to list all of these redactional histories. Among them are Diana Vikander Edelman, King Saul in the Historiography of Judah (JSOTSup 121; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1991); Stuart Weeks, “Biblical Literature and the Emergence of Ancient Jewish Nationalism,” BibInt 10 (2002) 144-57; Klaus-Peter Adam, “Nocturnal Intrusions and Divine Intervention on Behalf of Judah: David’s Wisdom and Saul’s Tragedy in 1 Samuel 26,” VT 59 (2009) 1-33; Walter Moberly, “By Stone and Sling: 1 Samuel 17:50 and the Problem of Misreading David’s Victory over Goliath,” pp. 329-42 in On Stone and Scroll: Essays in Honour of Graham Ivor Davies, ed. by J. K. Aitken, K. J. Dell and B. A. Mastin (BZAW 420; Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2011); Thomas Bolin, “1-2 Samuel and Jewish Paideia in the Persian and Hellenistic Periods,” pp. 133-58 in Deuteronomy – Kings as Emerging Authoritative Books: A Conversation ed. by D. V. Edelman (SBLANE Monographs 6; Atlanta: SBL, 2014); Brian Neil Peterson, Authors of the Deuteronomistic History: Locating a Tradition of Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014); Mark Leucther, “The Rhetoric of Convention: The Foundational Saul Narratives (1 Samuel 9-11),” Journal of Religious History 40 (2016) 3-19. Lemche sees the Solomon material as written during the Hellenistic period by literati capturing cultural memory (“Solomon as Cultural Memory”).
[24] Diana V. Edelman, “Did Saulide-Davidic Rivalry Resurface in Early Persian Yehud?” pp. 70-92 in The Land That I will Show You, ed. by M. P. Graham and J. A. Dearman (JSOTSup 343; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001), and Gary N. Knoppers, “Israel’s First King and ‘the Kingdom of YHWH in the Hands of the Sons of David’: The Place of the Saulide Monarchy in the Chronicler’s Historiography,” pp. 187-213 in Saul in Story and Tradition.
[25] Philip R. Davies, “Saul, Hero and Villain,” pp. 131-40 in Remembering Biblical Figures GET MORE
[26] See the essays in Ian Douglas Wilson and Diana Edelman, eds.,History, Memory, Hebrew Scriptures: A Festschrift for Ehud Ben Zvi (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2015; and Philip R. Davies. “1 Samuel and the ‘Deuteronomistic History,’” pp. 105-18 in Is Samuel among the Deuteronomists?.
[27] “Palaces as Sites of Memory and Their Impact on the Construction of an Elite ‘Hybrid’ (Local-Global) Cultural Identity in Persian-Period Literature,” pp. 99-114 in Memory and the City in Ancient Israel, ed. by D. V. Edelman and E. B. Zvi (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2014).
[28] Barbara Green, King Saul’s Asking (Interfaces; Collegeville: Liturgical, 2003) and How Are the Mighty Fallen? A Dialogical Study of King Saul in 1 Samuel (JSOTSup 365; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2003).
[29] Space theories have also been applied in video game studies. See, for example, Michael Nitsche, Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Game Worlds (Cambridge, MA/ London: MIT Press, 2008); and Thomas Rowland, “We Will Travel by Map: Maps as Narrative Spaces in Video Games and Medieval Texts,” pp. 189-201 in Digital Gaming. For a look at imaginary worlds throughout history, including games, see Mark J. P. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (New York/London: Routledge, 2012). See also his essay, “Worlds,” pp. 125-31 in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. by M. J. P> Wolf and B. Perron (New York: Routledge, 2014)
[30] Uriah Kim does a spatial analysis of the Deuteronomist’s account of Josiah in Decolonizing Josiah: Toward a Postcolonial Reading of the Deuteronomistic History (The Bible in the Modern World 5; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2006).
[31] Although Francis Landy notes how cultural memory of an historical event imposes a “symbolic geography on the landscape” (“Threshing Floors and Cities,” p. 81 in Memory and the City).
[32] What Landy calls “the poetics of memory” (p. 93 in “Threshing Floors”).
[33] See also the essays in Playing with the Past and in Daniel T. Kline, ed., Digital Gaming Re-Imagines the Middle Ages (Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture 15; London/New York: Routledge, 2014), which devotes a whole section to the re-imagination of the Middle Ages.
[34] Mark S. Smith, The Memoirs of God: History, Memory, and the Experience of the Divine in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2004). See, also, the essays in Diana V. Edelman and Ehud Ben Zvi, eds. Memory and the City in Ancient Israel (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2014).
[35] On the historical setting of World of Warcraft, see the essays in Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rattberg, eds., Digital Culture, Play and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader (Cambridge, MA/ London: MIT Press, 2008). On the same phenomenon with a different historical trope, see James Campbell, “Just Less than Total War: Simulating World War II as Ludic Nostalgia,” pp. 183-200 in Zach Whalen and Laurie N. Taylor, eds. Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008).
[36] One group of scholars call this “neomedievalism”; see Jennifer C. Stone, Peter Kudenov and Teresa Combs, “Accumulating Histories: A Social Practice Approach to Medievalism in High Fantasy MMORTPGs,” pp. 107-18 in Digital Gaming. For a discussion of how game enemies do not evoke empathy, see Peter Knapp, “Violence,” pp. 345-52 in Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies.
[37] Cogburn and Silcox draw a similar parallel but with respect to Greek literature (Philosophy through Video Games, 91-108
[38] On the oral features of this episode, see Raymond F. Person, Jr., “The Story of David and Goliath from the Perspective of the Study of Oral Traditions,” pp. 363-73 in Celebrate Her for the Fruit of Her Hands: Studies in Honor of Carol L. Meyers, ed. by S. Ackerman, C. E. Carter and B. A. Nakhai (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2014).
[39] Much of the secondary literature focuses on this variation. See, for example, Yairah Amit, “The Delicate Balance in the Image of Saul and its Place in the Deuteronomistic History,” pp. 71-79 in Saul in Story and Tradition, ed. by C. S. Ehrlich (FAT 47; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006); and Dawn M. Sellars, “An Obedient Servant? The Reign of King Saul (1 Samuel 13-15) Reassessed,” JSOT 35 (2011): 317-38.
[40] On the hero/warrior trope in biblical texts, see Gregory Mobley, The Empty Men: The Heroic Tradition of Ancient Israel (Anchor Bible Reference Library; New York: London: Doubleday, 2005); Daniel Bodi, Demise of the Warlord: A New Look at the David Story (Hebrew Bible Monographs 26; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2010); and Mark S. Smith, Poetic Heroes: Literary Commemorations of Warriors and Warrior Culture in the Early Biblical World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014).
[41] On the role of evocative space in video games, see Nitsche, Video Game Spaces.
[42] W. Lee Humphreys, “The Tragedy of King Saul: A Study of the Structure of 1 Samuel 9-31,” JSOT 6 (1978): 18-27, and “From Tragic Hero to Villain: A Study of the Figure of Saul and the Development of 1 Samuel,” JSOT 22 (1982): 97-109.
[43] Samuel Hildebrandt, “The Servants of Saul: ‘Minor’ Characters and Royal Commentary in 1 Samuel 9-13,” JSOT 40 (2015): 179-200; Orly Kerem and Hagit Taragon, “Merab, Saul’s Mute and Muffled Daughter,” JBL 134 (2015): 85-103.
[44] Jonathan Jacobs, “The Role of Secondary Characters in the Story of the Anointing of Saul (I Samuel ix-x),” VT 58 (2008): 495-509.
[45] Raymond R. Person, Jr., “The Problem of ‘Literary Unity’ from the Perspective of the Study of Oral Traditions,” pp. 217-37 in Empirical Models Challenging Biblical Criticism, ed. by R. F. Person and R. Rezetko (AIL 25; Atlanta: SBL, 2016).
[46] On foreshadowing in another part of 1 Samuel, see Walter Brueggeman, “Narrative Coherence and Theological Intentionality in 1 Samuel 18,” CBQ 55 (1993): 225-43.
[47] Marsha C. White, “Saul and Jonathan in 1 Samuel 1 and 14,” pp. 119-38 in Saul in Story and Tradition.
[48] For the role that clothing plays in the story, see Ora Horn Prousner, “Suited to the Throne: The Symbolic Use of Clothing in David and Saul Narratives,” JSOT 71 (1996): 27-37.
[49] Pamela T. Reis, “Eating the Blood: Saul and the Witch of Endor,” JSOT 73 (1997): 3-23.
[50] Gregory Mobley, “Glimpses of the Heroic Saul,” pp. 80-87 and Christophe Nihan, “Saul among the Prophets (1 Sam 10:10-12 and 19:18-24): The Reworking of Saul’s Figure in the Context of the Debate on ‘Charismatic Prophecy’ in the Persian Period,” pp. 88-118 both in Saul in Story and Tradition.
[51] Isaac Kalimi, “The Rise of Solomon in the Ancient Israelite Historiography,” pp. 7-44 and Pekka Särkiö, “Solomon in History and Tradition, pp. 45-56 both in The Figure of Solomon in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Tradition, ed. by J. Verheyden (Themes in Biblical Narrative, Jewish and Christian Traditions 16; Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013). For a study of the parallels between 1 Samuel 9 and 28, see Michael Matthew, “The Prophet, the Witch and the Ghost: Understanding the Parody of Saul as a ‘Prophet’ and the Purpose of Endor in the Deuteronomistic History,” JSOT 38 (2014): 315-46.
[52] David M. Carr, The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), esp. 4-7.
[53] On the redaction of the Solomon narratives, see chap. 6 in Andrew Knapp, Royal Apologetic in the Ancient Near East (SBL Writings from the Ancient Near East Supplement Series 4; Atlanta: SBL, 2015), 249-76. I disagree with his dating of the material, however.
[54] See the discussions by Thomas Römer, “The Case of the Book of Kings,” pp. 187-201 and James R. Linville, “On the Authority of Dead Kings,” pp. 203-22 both in Deuteronomy – Kings. On Solomon as the embodiment of both the evil monarch (Saul) and the good one (David), see Jacques Vermeylen, “The Book of Samuel within the Deuteronomistic History,” pp. 67-91 in Is Samuel among the Deuteronomists?.
[55] For an intriguing examination of this interplay, see Randall C. Bailey, “Reading Backwards: A Narrative Technique for the Queering of David, Saul, and Samuel,” pp. 66-81 in The Fate of King David: The Past and Present of a Biblical Icon, ed. by T. Linafelt, C. V. Camp, and T. Beal (LHBOTS 500; New York/London: T&T Clark, 2010). See also Silvia Schroer and Thomas Staubli, “Saul, David and Jonathan – The Story of a Triangle? A Contribution to the Issue of Homosexuality in the First Testament,” pp. 22-36 in Samuel and Kings, ed. by A. Brenner (A Feminist Companion to the Bible, second series 7; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2000). Walter Brueggemann examines the continued elements of the Solomon traditions in Solomon: Israel’s Ironic Icon of Human Achievement (Studies on Personalities of the Old Testament; Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2005).
Дата добавления: 2021-07-19; просмотров: 59; Мы поможем в написании вашей работы! |
Мы поможем в написании ваших работ!