Literary Facts

Stephen Geller opens an essay on blood in “P” by stating that he is treating the Pentateuch as a literary unit.

What the “priestly editor” produced, he argue is not “patchwork aggregate signifying nothing” but “a work meaningful in the whole, a tapestry more than the sum of its woven strands, a truly fit object of literary analysis” (97-8).

He offers this spirited elaboration of the point: “It might be argued that such coherence as one claims to find in an edited work exists only in the mind’s eye, as the product of ingenious exegesis, and does not exist in fact But what is a literary “fact” itself except a construct of interpretation? Even source criticism is a literary activity, as its most gifted practitioners have always known. It, too, cannot escape the iron curve of the hermeneutical circle, and can claim a role in science and scholarship only to the extent it is aware of its own ultimate dependence on literary sensibility. Indeed, if anything has title to the status of “fact” in multilayered ancient texts like the Bible it is surely only the final, completed form before us, not hypothetical strands isolated with acumen often as arbitrary as the most far-fetched literary analysis. To deny the interpretational legitimacy, even primacy, of the whole over its parts is to deny a work like the Pentateuch, the expression of a millennium of Hebrew history, thought and literary art, its right to be heard as a unity, to bind it forever in Lilliputian conceptions. Atomism has been at work on the Bible long enough. It is time for literary analysis to see what can be achieved through the principles of cohesion, synthesis and order” (98).

Geller, “Blood Cult: Toward a Literary Theology of the Priestly Work of the Pentateuch,” Prooftexts 12 (1992) 97-124.