ABSTRACT
The policing and institutionalising of the Old Testament by a variety of theological traditions has often not had a liberating effect on the narratives. The foregoing has attempted to show that a close reading of the Old Testament narrative will often concur with a person’s first reading. Conversely, with great literary work, the ingredients which access the inner and originating functions of the internal dynamics of the literary narrative are just those which are its communicative identity. Conviction is a function of the observer’s psychology, and it should be isolated from the measurement of narrative and from empirical analyses. In relation to the degree of originality in the Old Testament, we come hopefully at the end of what effectively is a totalitarian editorial tradition of excessive censorship by Eurocentric 19th-century theological institutionalism, though there have been exceptions to this corporate trend.
