Adultery in the House of David

In our secular world we continue to authorize, albeit unconsciously, many biblical ideologies, granting the Bible the status not only of a spiritual guide but also a manual for politics. Furthermore, we often attach ideological formations to the Bible that are alien to it, ones that arose in its long and varied history of interpretation and that by association and confusion come to reap the same authority that we so reflexively attach to the Bible. I want to begin to disentangle that association, to separate the discipline of biblical studies from the Bible and then to proceed to offer a reading of biblical narratives that runs contrary to the assumptions that inform so much of biblical studies. ¹ Biblical narratives make very different kinds of claims of legitimation from biblical scholarship (I use the phrase in a specialized sense here, restricting its application to the historical-critical scholarship forged in the atmosphere of German historicism). The ambition of “higher criticism” was to construct a metanarrative, a privileged metadiscourse capable of offering eventually the Truth about the history of the Bible’s composition and hence necessarily about ancient Israelite history. Biblical narratives— and that plural contrasts with the singular metanarrative—make no such sweeping claim; their truths are multiple and conflicting, and they resist the consistency, continuity, and comprehensiveness that characterize metanarrative as surely as they resist being distilled into a single story. Ironic as it may sound, biblical narratives are far more compatible with the understanding of postmodernism distilled by Lyotard (xxiv) as “incredulity toward metanarratives” than they are with modern biblical scholarship. But upon reflection, there is little irony here, for the ancient narratives that arose in disparate social and historical circumstances are likely to exhibit the character of multiplicity, while modernism’s biblical scholarship is bound to reflect the nineteenth century’s passion for an authoritative metanarrative. If the biblical narratives cannot be accurately labeled “postmodern,” it is only because they cannot exhibit incredulity toward metanarratives that await later periods to be imagined and still later ones to be critiqued. If we can sometimes discern the impulse toward metanarrative in the Bible—after all, this is a story that purports to span all of human history—it surfaces only to be stubbornly subverted by conflicting stories.