ABSTRACT
This study has yielded a rich crop of universal conundrums and possible solutions. The rounded humanity of the characters as presented in al-Tha‘labc’s collection of tales, and his willingness to leave the stories to speak for themselves, combine to create a work with a multitude of facets. Indeed, the multidimensional characters are at their best reflected in multidimensional readings: layer upon layer of story goes to make up each tale, and the tale can be cast and re-cast in perpetuum, depending on the reading one selects. The Job story, with its profound moral complexities and close emotional interaction between God and prophet, the story of Saul, simplified in many ways by the absence of God as a principal player, the David narrative, returning once more to a focus on God and prophet but in much clearer waters than the Job story that preceded it, and Noah, ripe with mythological allusions and deep with bitter truths, have all responded in their own ways to the application of Crime and Punishment, Oedipus, and Order and Chaos as story patterns through which different aspects of their meanings can be explored.
