The stories of the family troubles of Judah and David: a study of their literary links

Abstract

This article adds some newly discovered literary links between Gen. xxxviii and the Succession Narrative (SN) to those already observed by scholars in the past thirty or so years. Gen. xxxviii is found to be dependent on and owes to the SN most of its literary components like names, plot, theme, motifs and special locutions. The literary conclusion arrived, contrary to the widely accepted traditio-historical view, is that Gen. xxxviii has no oral tradition stage before being written down. Further analysis of the story does not confirm its belonging to the J source but re-affirms its genealogical concern. The article concludes with a conjectured raison d'être for Gen. xxxviii, namely to provide a "narrative evidence" for David's genealogical link to Judah, i.e. to prove David's Jewishness. It is further conjectured that Gen. xxxviii was probably written about the time of the emergence of the book of Ruth, which shows similar concern.

Intertextuality in Old Testament Research

“…Even though there are slight variations among the texts, they clearly conform to a pre-established structure that includes all the conventional pieces of that narrative type. By contrast, the Succession Narrative of 2 Samuel-1 Kings has much of the same content as the story of Judah and Tamar, such as a character named Tamar and the committal of a sexually illicit act (Ho 1999). Yet, these resemblances 'are a disorderly hotch-poch [sic] of generally quite imprecise parallels' (Noble 2002: 227) and 'are merely fortuitous, and of no significance for interpreting either text ' (2002: 244).…”

“…A scholar can amass a plethora of lexical, thematic and/or formal links between two or more texts and argue forcefully for authorial intent, but, as with any other method of biblical interpretation, there will always be room for disagreement. The data proposed as evidence of intertextuality will be evaluated differently by different scholars, and what seems to be evidence of intentional allusion for one reader might appear to be a cluster of coincidences for another (e.g., Ho 1999;Noble 2002). The one possible exception is explicit quotation, especially when the author of the original quote is named.…”

The Aqedah as ‘template’? Genesis 22 and 1 Kings 17–18

“… 54. See Fisch, 1982: 425–437; Gordon, 1988: 69–80; Zakovitch, 1993: 139–152; Ho, 1999: 514–531; Berman, 2004; Berger, 2009: 433–452; Grossman, 2009: 394–414; Shalom-Guy, 2016: 1–29; Teeter (forthcoming 2021). …”