David Jobling – författare

These three studies continue the methods and aims of Volume I (1978, 2nd edn 1986), applying a structuralist method developed mainly from Claude LTvi-Strauss and A.J. Greimas to various texts and problems in the narrative sections of the Hebrew Bible. The new studies go beyond those of the previous volume, however, in two ways. They begin to take account of the deconstructive method of Derrida, the ''standing on its head'' of structuralism; and they seek to make a contribution to feminist and liberation exegesis and hermeneutics. The first study is a deconstruction of Genesis 2-3, showing that the oppositions which the text purports to establish (including divine vs. human and male vs. female) are in fact assumed in advance. The second deals with the implicit political theory of the Deuteronomists, and discovers an ''indeterminate'' attitude to monarchy. The third, inspired by Norman K. Gottwald and seeking, from a great methodological distance, to illuminate his problematic of Israel''s origins, analyses the attitude implied by the Bible towards Transjordan and the Israelites who live there.

David Jobling uses a structuralist method developed mainly from Claude Levi-Strauss and A.J. Greimas to apply to various texts and problems in the narrative sections of the Hebrew Bible. Areas of the Bible covered are 1 Samuel; Numbers 11-12, and 1 Kings 17-18.

A range of powerful contemporary engagements with the Bible by literary critics, philosophers, writers and activists is brought together for the first time in this Reader.

1 Samuel is a national autobiography of the Hebrew people. David Jobling reads 1 Samuel as a story that is complete in itself, although it is part of a much larger narrative. He examines it as a historical document in a double sense: (1) as a document originating from ancient Israel and (2) as a telling of the past. Organizing the text through the three interlocking themes of class, race, and gender, Jobling asks how this historical - and canonical - story relates to a modern world in which these themes continue to be of crucial importance.

While drawing on the resources of biblical narratology," Jobling deviates from mainstream methodology. He adopts a "critical narratology" informed by such cultural practices as feminism and psychoanalysis. He follows a structuralist tradition which finds meaning more in the text''s large-scale mythic patterns than in close reading of particular passages, and seeks methods specific to 1 Samuel rather than ones applicable to biblical narrative in general.

David Jobling, PhD, is a professor of Old Testament language and literature at St. Andrews College in Saskatoon. He is a co-chair of the Ideological Criticism section of the Society of Biblical Literature and a member of The Bible and Culture Collective.

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