Coming to terms with intertextuality: methodology behind Biblical criticism past and present

Abstract

Intertextuality, a handy label that signals interconnectedness between texts, has a long history of interconnectedness with texts. As an inherent feature of all literature, it could not have escaped biblical criticism. Its own historical-critical method, in particular, has been deeply intertextual in that it accounts for the cumulative textual processes behind the Hebrew Bible. It is, however, only in its theoretical expression of the late 1960s with a flat denial of historicism that biblical criticism has found intertextuality unpalatable. This mini-dissertation is a brief cross-disciplinary gesture, aiming to frame the intertextual dilemma within the context of biblical criticism past and present, using its own literary critical and semiotic resources. As a random intertext, the biblical account of the Passover in two ‘parallel’ passages here complements the broad canvas of the intertextual theory, biblical studies of European and American vintage, history, philosophy, and postmodernism in outlining the paradigm transition from text- to reader-oriented biblical criticism. From such an enterprise, intertextuality emerges as a mere critical, if useful, framework whose claims to ahistoricity (objectivity) and novelty are dubious and subject to the very methodological questioning it seeks to clarify. As an intertextual theory and practice in one, the following mini-dissertation is as much an example of its terminological precursor as an illustration of it.