ABSTRACT
Regina Schwartz, in her introduction to The Book and the Text, suggests that this collection of essays offers ‘the complementary strain’ of interpretive work to that found in Alter and Kermode’s Literary Guide to the Bible, ‘for its essays are deliberately engaged in a dialogue between currents in contemporary theory’. The critical approaches represented vary considerably, almost to the extent of rendering their proximity a kind of category mistake. James C.Nohrnberg’s essay focuses attention on its biblical text, as does Mary Ann Tolbert’s. Others are concerned with political, cultural and theoretical issues as exemplified by biblical problematics. There is a long and impressive essay by Meir Sternberg which treats of narrative chronology and the techniques of handling time employed by biblical writers.
