An exegetical reading of the Abraham narrative in Genesis : semantic, textuality and theology

Abstract

This thesis is basically an exegetical work investigating the Abraham narrative (Gen 11:27-25:11) in Genesis in a sense of a text-centered approach, which aims to the Sitz im Text not to reconstruct the early Sitz im Leben of the narrative. In other words, this study seeks primarily to interpret the final form of the narrative as the locus of revelation. Taking the adages ‘no text is an island,’ ‘let the text speak for itself’ as its point of departure, this study focuses on the question how the individual episodes in the Abraham narrative are played by texts in Genesis and in the larger literary units in the Pentateuch. In this vein, the work examines the narrative through careful attention to literary and rhetorical features such as narrative structure, recurring themes and motifs, allusion (or foreshadowing), wordplays, points of view, plot, and characterization by attempting to analyze and describe its structure and the semantics of the arrangement of source material in the pericope of the narrative. For it is believed that the literary tools used by the author (or the final composer) to establish continuity and link various constituent parts together in a unified literary composition. Seen within such a context, two methodological approaches in this study will be offered promise for discovering possible the narrative function of the Abraham cycle: intertextuality and the composition criticism. The former provides the compositional tactics mapped out by the author (or the final composer) for the recognition of narrative literary context of the Abraham narrative within the macro-structure and the micro-structure of the Pentateuch. While, the latter asks the right questions to discover textual correlations between the narrative and the rest of texts in Genesis and in the Pentateuch. As a result, this approach to the narrative reveals a distinct compositional strategy, which is to convey the author’s (or the final composer’s) theological considerations clearly and persuasively. Methodological peculiarities for reading the Abraham narrative are considered in chapter 1. Chapter 2 is to examine in detail of the inner literary arrangement of the Abraham narrative in the narrative frame of Genesis and the Pentateuch. It is followed by a discussion of the inner textual integrity of logic, and syntax of the narrative in chapter 3. The intertextual relationships between the pericope and the remaining texts in the Pentateuch will be explored by syntactically examining of the texts at semantic and thematic level. The theological considerations of the narrative proceed by these scrutinized intra/inter-textual examination of the texts. The final chapter, chapter 5, summarizes some of the advantages of applying the method to the narrative and some exegetical suggestions in terms of pre-critical angle. Please cite as follows: Hong, KS 2007, An exegetical reading of the Abraham narrative in Genesis : semantic, textuality and theology, PhD thesis, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, viewed yymmdd < http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd- etd-05262008-155326>