Parables and Conflict in the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

Parables and Conflict in the Hebrew Bible examines the intimate relationship between parables and conflict in the Hebrew Bible. Challenging the scholarly consensus, Jeremy Schipper argues that parables do not function as appeals to change their audience's behavior. Nor do they serve to diffuse tensions in regards to the various conflicts in which their audiences are involved. Rather, the parables function to help create, intensify, and justify judgments and hostile actions against their audiences. In order to examine how the parables accomplish these functions, this book pays particular attention to issues of genre and recent developments in genre theory, shifting the central issues in the interpretation of Hebrew Bible parables.

The Woman from Tekoa (2 Sam. 14) and the Character of Judicial Wisdom in Ancient Israel

“…On the notion of a "dramatic fiction," see Schökel, 1986: 229. do similarities. 8 In fact, some scholars (Coats, 1981;Niditch, 1993: 67-87;Schipper, 2009: 2) challenge classifying the parable as a genre of biblical prose at all, preferring to say that biblical authors relied on a variety of literary genres in the construction of parables. It is more productive, therefore, to examine how these texts use particular modes of communication in the construction of their narratives, rather than trying to assess how they do or do not conform to hypothetical or idealised forms (i.e.…”