Inner-biblical Allusion: Scripture's Reuse of Scripture

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The Hebrew Bible was not written for the first-time reader. Not infrequently do readers encounter an ambiguity that they can decipher only after reading a story or passage elsewhere in the Bible. The Hebrew Bible is saturated with such veiled cross-references, which presuppose a readership that is intimately familiar with the whole of the Hebrew Bible. In the words of Meir Sternberg, the Hebrew Bible is a "web of words." It is replete with repetitions, prolepses, analepses, typologies, echoes, and allusions. Those who have read through the Bible many times are alert to such cross-references, but even so the reasons for all these cross-connections are often elusive. Their presence makes it very difficult to detect any flow of thought that runs through the whole. Readers are constantly thrust forward or thrust back, conceptually speaking. This feature of the Hebrew Bible, its pervasive self-referencing, is one of the major barriers faced by uninitiated readers of ancient Hebrew literature like the Hebrew Bible.Literary allusions distinguish themselves from other types of literary cross-references in that they bear, in their compositional pattern, a fundamental irony. On the one hand, an allusion is rendered in a covert form, without citation formula or quotative. This makes them, at times, difficult to recognize and even more difficult to validate. On the other hand, they are meant to be observed, and their observation transforms the semantics of the context that they evoke or the context in which they appear. Not being overt, however, the nature of the transformation is often elusive and difficult to verify. Alluding is a customary habit of biblical authors, especially late biblical authors. Understanding dynamics of inner-biblical allusion is essential for interpretation. Inner-biblical allusions are also among the earliest preserved interpretations of Hebrew Bible, and are vital to a proper understanding of the history of Jewish biblical interpretation. Although the academic study of inner-biblical allusion is nearly three decades old, the current state of the field resembles the field of comparative philology as it was practiced in biblical studies for well over one hundred years up to the writing of James Barr's famous book: Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament (1968). In a time when individual studies of comparative philology had been multiplied beyond number, Barr's work was needed as the first full-blown synthetic study of the field that considered the topic in a systematic fashion with a thoroughgoing methodology. Like the field of comparative philology before Barr, we now see individual studies of inner-biblical allusion increase at an impressive rate without the sort of systematic methodological reflection that Barr applied to that other field. The proposed project intends to fill this gap, to provide a synthetic work on allusion within the Hebrew Scriptures that consciously aims at giving the reader the analytical categories that are currently lacking.