Structure, genre, and rhetoric of the Enneateuch

Abstract

The article seeks to fill a major lacuna in modern biblical scholarship. Although the studies of the last four decades (since the late 1970s) have done much to explore the literary properties of the Hebrew Bible, the exegetes tend to focus upon relatively limited pieces of text — a few chapters, a book at most — and hardly ever take a look at the larger literary entities to which these texts belong. A glaring example, considered in the present article, is Genesis-Kings. The author demonstrates that despite being divided into several books (nine in the Jewish tradition, hence the modern scholarly term Enneateuch; twelve in Christian) Genesis-Kings is an integral and self-contained composition, held together by a continuous and reasonably coherent plot as well as by stylistic homogeneity: all of its parts are dominated by narrative, to which all other literary formats are subordinated. This composition was, in the author’s opinion, created in Babylonian exile. The article further shows that the Enneateuch displays a harmonious, symmetric overall structure resembling that of ancient Near Eastern treaties between suzerains and vassals. The rhetorical purpose of this structure is, first, to foreground the sections that contain commandments (from Exodus 20 through Deuteronomy), and second, to convince the readers of the necessity to follow them. Thus, although the biblical books that constitute the Enneateuch are usually termed “historical,” for its creators recounting the past was just a means of ensuring observance in the present and thus preserving the community of exiles from assimilation. Refs 23.

Keywords:

Hebrew Bible, Enneateuch, Genesis-Kings, genre, rhetoric, literary structure