Historical Poetics of Ancient Jewish Literature
Texture was conceived during a brainstorming session in Münich in 2013. It was born out of a mutual dissatisfaction with fissures between the various academic methodologies employed to explore literary shape and compositional history in ancient Jewish literature (sometimes lumped into the categories ‘diachronic’ and ‘synchronic’). Most textbooks on methods in biblical studies and most biblical commentaries treat our various methods like a set of changeable spectacles. The culmination of ‘interpretation’ in this mode is the aggregation of observations accumulated by changing spectacles, a constant code-switching that can be hermeneutically naïve. It fails to recognize that just as any one method is a system of mutually supporting predications that are executed by following a programmatic set of steps, so too an academic discipline as a whole has an organisation and structure. Its methods must work together in harmony. We imagined Texture as an extended inquiry into ways that each method can and must be informed by the findings of every other method to construct a lucid system.
As we worked on Texture, it evolved. We became convinced that an integration of existing methods alone was not sufficient to the task, because current methods and approaches are not always suited to the study of ancient literatures. They are often anachronistic, or predicated on unscientific premises (e.g. that humans ‘think’ the same throughout time). There is no apparent reason to assume that modern reading/writing and ancient reading/writing are identical. Modern readers have no access to intuitions from ancient cultures. Discovering those intuitions is not straightforward, because ancient Judaism did not produce meta-literature reflecting on the nature of literature or its properties. A historical poetics has to be reconstructed.
There are two avenues for pursuing reconstruction. First, one can compare and contrast reading and writing practices from comparable cultures: ancient Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia, classical Greece, late antique Judaism, and other more remote textual cultures (e.g. ancient India). Second, the texts that ancient Judaism left behind are the primary evidence. The texts testify to the nature of their own textuality. Texture proceeds along those two parallel tracks: pursuit of ancient analogues for ancient Jewish reading and writing, and inductive inquiry into the nature of the writings they left behind.
“Poetics,” though contested, is a useful term. It refers to the theoretical study of the general principles of literature: the nature of literary objects and the properties of literary forms. Poetics makes explicit those features of literature that make effects possible. (Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 118; Todorov, “Poétique,” 103).
Texture 