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Joanna Klein
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Michael Morales
Have you ever heard echoes of the Genesis patriarchs in the story of David? If so, you're not alone. Join us as we speak with Joanna Klein about her monograph Narrative Analogy in the David Story, where she brings out parallels between Genesis 22:50 and 1 Samuel 16 through 1 Kings 2. You're listening to New Books Network, and I'm your host, Michael Morales. Joanna Klein earned her PhD from Harvard University and is Assistant professor of Old Testament at Gordon College. Joanna, welcome to New Books and Biblical Studies.
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Joanna Klein
Thanks. It's great to be here.
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Michael Morales
Tell us about yourself and how you came to explore the David story, Sure.
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Joanna Klein
I always loved reading as I was growing up, I loved stories, and I was very into the Bible and I loved reading the stories of the Bible, the Old Testament especially. And so when I got to college at Gordon College in Windham, Massachusetts, where I teach now, I ended up majoring in Biblical studies and then adding an English major as well. And so it was here at Gordon where I started learning about scholarly literary approaches to the Bible and ways that you can study the Bible from a kind of literary angle. When I was in grad school, I was thinking through what I might do for my dissertation, and one of my teachers, Andy Teeter, suggested that I look into connections between the David story and the patriarchal narratives. Some people in the past had studied those connections mostly in terms of the so called succession narrative in Two Samuel and the Yahweh Source and the Pentateuch. But not a lot had been done beyond that. And so I started looking into that, and it ended up being a good fit for bringing together my biblical studies and literary interests. Although the book goes beyond literary approaches and looks at some texts in terms of historical development as well. But I ended up writing my dissertation on that topic, and my dissertation eventually led to this book.
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Michael Morales
So you take a narrative analogy approach, explain for us what narrative analogy means in biblical studies.
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Joanna Klein
The first scholar to use the term narrative analogy in the context of biblical studies was probably Robert Alter. He's a scholar of the Hebrew Bible who's done the most to popularize literary approaches to the Bible. And he called narrative analogy a literary feature through which one part of the text provides oblique commentary on another. So narrative analogy is basically a series of allusions in one text to another text or text. If there's just one textual connection, it's simply an illusion, but not really narrative analogy. So narrative analogy requires multiple illusions, and it makes it so that one story is set up as a comparison to another. You basically have a series of parallels between biblical texts that function to draw comparisons between characters and events. And there are various ways that narrative analogy can be identified in the text. It's often through a density of shared plot elements. So there's a bunch of plot points that share similarities. Sometimes there's more textual, structural similarities in a text that can be used to build a narrative analogy. Sometimes there's thematic similarities, and in some cases there are shared distinctive words or phrases that help to build a narrative analogy.
- [05:10]
Michael Morales
As a sample of your findings, would you tell us about the narrative analogy between David and Joseph?
- [05:15]
Joanna Klein
I looked at a couple different examples where an Analogical structure compares David with Joseph. The first is at the beginning of the David story. I explored this in chapter two of the book, which is called from shepherd to ruler 1st Samuel 16:18 and Genesis 37 and 39. I'll tell you about that one first. So at the beginning of the stories of David and Joseph, we see a few general similarities between them. David and Joseph are both the youngest or almost youngest in their families. In Joseph's case, almost the youngest. They both have elderly fathers, they're both shepherds, and they're both handsome. They both receive a somewhat ambiguous sign that they will rule. So Joseph has these dreams about his brothers and family bowing down to him. And then David is anointed by Samuel, but without a lot of information or details about what that means. They both eventually do rise to power in various ways, but these things don't come to fruition until much later in their stories. All those details at the beginning of the stories of David and Joseph are pretty general similarities, but we see some more specific connections when we look at David's journey to check on his brothers in 1 Samuel 17. Compare that with Joseph's similar Aaron to check on his brothers in Genesis 37. So both David and Joseph are sent by their fathers to see to the well being in Hebrew shalom in both cases of their elder brothers. So they're supposed to go check on their brothers and they're supposed to bring something back from them. It's called their pledge in 1 Samuel 17 in David's case. And Joseph is supposed to bring back a word from his brothers in Genesis 37. In both cases, the younger brothers show this presumption to greatness that irritates their brothers. In Joseph's case, it's his dreams and wearing his cloak. And in David's case, it's his questions about who's gonna fight Goliath, who's gonna do something about Goliath. And both of them persist in the face of their brother's rebuke. So their brothers don't like their attitude and they continue telling dreams or asking questions in both cases on the journey. Neither David nor Joseph returns home after the journey to check on his brothers. So Saul ends up keeping David in his service. In 1st Samuel 18, Joseph is sold into slavery in Egypt, so they both end up in service of a ruler after this journey. Also, after David defeats Goliath, Saul's son Jonathan strips himself of his robe and gives it to David. It looks like a kind of reversal of Joseph's brother's act of stripping Joseph of his robe, both based on the same Hebrew root for pashat. And so we have an interesting little reversal detail there. One fascinating feature of the David and Joseph parallels in this part of the David story is that most of the parallels aren't there in the Septuaginthe, the Greek version of the story, which is much shorter than the one Hebrew one we have in the Masoretic text. And scholars debate about how these two versions of the story came about. But many think the Greek version reflects an earlier and shorter version of the text originally in Hebrew. And I would agree with that model. I think the story might have been expanded in part by building on the model of Joseph's Aaron to check on his brothers. And that's why so many of the parallels are in the longer version of the story and not the shorter version. When you look at these parallels between David and Joseph in this part of the story, they help highlight this theme of sibling rivalry that's a huge central theme driving the whole plot of the Joseph story. It's a more minor theme in the David story when it comes to the conflict between David and his brothers. That doesn't really play a big role in the rest of the David story, But it does set the stage for this sibling rivalry theme as it develops in the David story on a kind of tribal level, conflict between Saul coming from the tribe of Benjamin and David coming from the tribe of Judah. And it also foreshadows the various sibling struggles that we'll see later among David's children in 2 Samuel. So I looked at the parallels between David and Joseph at the beginnings of their stories. And then I return to some David and Joseph parallels when looking at the negative turning point in David's reign, the Bathsheba incident. I explored these parallels in a couple different ways in chapter four of the book, which is called fathers and sons 2 Samuel 11:13 and the Joseph story. So first of all, I looked at the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife that we see in Genesis 39 and compared that with the David at bathsheba incident in 2 Samuel 12 and 13. And when you look at these stories next to each other, they're kind of mirror images of each other. You have this series of parallels, but they're not straightforward similarities like we saw in the last example. They're these kind of reversed mirror image details. So, for example, in the Joseph story, Joseph's brought to a foreign land, while in the David story, David stays home and sends his army off to fight in a foreign land. Joseph is a vulnerable slave. Whereas David is a powerful king, Joseph is handsome, which gets him into trouble in this story. And even though we know from elsewhere in the David story, David is handsome as well, here in this story, it's Bathsheba whose beauty is highlighted. Potiphar's wife in the Joseph story is the wife of Joseph's master, while Bathsheba is the wife of David's servant. And Potiphar's wife repeatedly asks Joseph to lie with her, but he refuses to do it and he won't commit adultery. Whereas David does lie with Bathsheba and does commit adultery and sin against God, the text says. In a kind of ironic twist, in the David story, Uriah becomes a Joseph like figure because he repeatedly refuses to sleep with his wife, just like Joseph repeatedly refused to sleep with Potiphar's wife. And when Joseph answers Potiphar's wife and protests against her, he says that God has given his master's house into his hand and has only withheld his wife, and so he won't do what's evil and sin against God. And we see various similarities in Nathan's speech to David. In 2 Samuel 12, Nathan tells David that God gave him the house and the wives even of his master to David, and David still did what was evil and took another man's wife. So we see that even though Joseph is in a much more vulnerable position, he was able to resist the advances of his master's wife and do what is right, whereas David, in a very powerful and privileged position, took advantage of that position and did what was wrong. And then we see as the story unfolds in the aftermath of this event, David's daughter Tamar becomes like a tragic Joseph figure. It's interesting that she and Joseph are the only biblical characters who wear a coat of many colors, or maybe a long sleeve coat. It's called a ketonet passin in Hebrew. And both of these coats get torn. In both stories, her story unfolds in this movement towards sibling sexual assault and murder, ending in a very bad place. Unlike the movement of the Joseph story where you have attempted sibling murder and then it moves towards sibling reconciliation in the Joseph story. So in the end, we see that the consequences of David failing to be like Joseph lead to violence and sibling rivalry in an opposite trajectory to the one in the Joseph story, where the Joseph story begins with violence and leads to reconciliation. In the David story, you see David failing to be like Joseph and it ends up in sibling rivalry and sibling violence.
- [13:38]
Michael Morales
What would you say is the message of this analogy in The David story. How does analogy generally function in narrative?
- [13:46]
Joanna Klein
There are several different ways that analogy functions in narratives. So in the case of the David and Joseph comparisons, in that first example, where you have David and Joseph compared based on them being youngest children and shepherds and going to check on their brothers, it looks like a positive comparison. It looks like it's meant to indicate that David is going to be a leader like Joseph, this hero who overcomes many difficulties to become a wise leader with God's help. And since Joseph comes to be seen in the Bible as a representative of the northern kingdom, this connection between David and Joseph helps portray David as a legitimate ruler of all Israel, not just Judah, which is his tribe and eventually his line is reigning over Judah, but that he is a ruler over all Israel, which is a picture we see in other places in the Bible as well. That idea of David as a ruler over all Israel is bolstered by parallels between David and Jacob, which I discuss many of in the book as well. But things change once you get to two Samuel. In terms of the function of narrative analogy, after the Bathsheba incident, you see this contrast between David and Joseph, where David fails just in the way that Joseph succeeded, where they become mirror images of each other. And this un Joseph like failure leads to murder and family conflicts, which is the opposite of that positive movement toward reconciliation that the Joseph story takes. So in these examples, the David Joseph parallels seem mostly to function to develop David's character in positive and negative ways. First positive and then negative. And then they also work to highlight important themes in the narrative, like sib rivalry. More generally, outside of these examples, narrative analogy can have various functions. You have to look at the particular dynamics of each use of analogy to figure out what the function might be. It's often used to develop characterization like the examples I just discussed. So you have a positive comparison between David and Joseph. More often there's some kind of contrast between the characters. So for example, in some of the David and Jacob parallels, David is portrayed as a Jacob like figure in some ways. Some things happen to David that are similar to things that happen to Jacob. But David is more positive than Jacob, whereas Jacob is a trickster going back and forth with his uncle Laban. David is more upright in his interactions with his father in law Saul than Jacob is. Sometimes the comparisons can highlight a stark difference between the characters. Like the case of the analogy between David and Joseph in the story of Bathsheba, narrative analogy often is used to strengthen major themes in the narrative. As I said, like sibling rivalry. We see other themes like measure for measure, consequences and God's providence highlighted in the David story analogies as well. And on an even bigger picture level, narrative analogy can help bring together stories that might originally have been independent into a connected narrative. So you can see that the stories of the patriarchs lead to David not only on a genealogical level where he's a descendant of some of these figures, but also in terms of similar plot points that happen to them, similar character strengths and flaws, and also the theme of God's faithfulness to these families despite the people's sins and mistakes, which are often similar. So you can see all these themes when you look at the individual narratives, but they're really emphasized through the use of narrative analogy that goes through all of these stories.
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Michael Morales
Joanna, thank you so much for joining us. It's been an enlightening conversation.
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Joanna Klein
Thanks for having me.
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Michael Morales
Friends, thanks again for joining us on New Books Network.
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Joanna Klein
Goodbye.