Truth, Beauty, and Goodness in Biblical Narratives: A by Krzysztof Sonek

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And when one’s subject matter is literature, clarity beyond a certain point becomes falsification. This is a very important restriction on the activity of literary criticism. When a subject matter is in its nature vague, clarity should consist, not in making it so clear as to be unrecognisable, but in recognising the vagueness, where it begins and ends and the 71 72 73 74 75 Eliot, “The Function of Criticism,” 24. Eliot, “The Function of Criticism,” 24. Eliot, “The Function of Criticism,” 24. Eliot, “To Criticize the Critic,” 19.

Auerbach, Mimesis, 15. When Auerbach states that “the Biblical narrator, the Elohist, had to believe in the objective truth of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice” (Mimesis, 14), he is down the slippery slope of believing that we can easily establish the intention of the original author, or that the story had, in fact, an author in the modern sense of the word. Josipovici downplays certain aspects of Auerbach’s analysis, and says that “it is difficult to tell how far Auerbach is merely trying to express what is unique to this text, and how far he is trying to find words to make us grasp that we simply cannot treat the Bible as a ‘text,’ even a unique one” (Josipovici, The Book of God, 300).

Even the greatest hermeneutists, like Paul Ricoeur, do not always provide sufficient material to exemplify their statements. Essays on Biblical Interpretation are a typical case. I am aware that Gen 21:1-21 as my model text is interpreted in a certain isolation from its context. An attempt to apply the hermeneutical model which will be introduced in the next chapter to the text, and, at the same time, to take into consideration its context would exceed the limits of this book. However, when I discuss Gen 21:1-21 in the light of the historical-critical method, I pay attention to the pericope’s broader context.