spin

They're not necessary to the story that you want them to be telling. What are they doing there then?

No. Most good literature asks you to identify with the protagonists in order to partake in the kathartic event. You can't appreciate Hamlet unless you identify with him and his struggle over his love for his parents and the responsibility imposed upon him of revenging his father. You can't appreciate Gulliver's Travels unless you can identify with Gulliver and join in his reactions, as you must with Winston Smith when he shouts out to his torurer, "do it to Julia", for if you can't identify with him you miss out on the dilemma. If you don't identify there is no katharsis and you perceive nothing. You may as well have been watching a Spielberg flick.

You mean on reading the story you couldn't place yourself in Eve's position and not find yourself making the same (wrong) choice as she? I find what reveals them to God in the story is their covering up. It's a very nice irony in the story. They feel they have to hide because suddenly they know they are naked.

Hey, we are living in a superficial age. If the story doesn't jump up and thump you, it doesn'r reach you and you're on to something else. This is our problem more than the literature's.

And yet it's one of the most popular stories of all time. Funny that. It's usually not judged by it length. (Check out Blake's "Sick Rose". But then it's probably too short.)

First, characterisation is a much more modern concept and you can't retroject it into any ancient text. Secondly we are mainly dealing with prose in the snake story, so your poetic notions seem to be misplaced. You get motivations and emotion, but then you have to work at it. You don't get the long pans with Tom Hanks silhouetted against the sun or his hand shaking to "tip" you off that you should feel something.

Adam and Eve's characters are not there. The motivations and the emotions are. All you have to do is explore them. You don't have to be creative. Just explorative of what's there.

To understand much of this literature you have to work at it. And which of any of these give you character?? I think you are working under double standards. If it's in the bible it's of lesser quality.

What exactly do you find incoherent in the flood?

Have you read the stories told in the Kalevala? You have things told and retold differently and shifted around to be seen from various angles, but I don't hear people calling it incoherent. There's lots of inexact repetition in Beowulf... incoherent? No way.

What is shabby or incoherent about it that cannot be said about Beowulf, Kalevala, the Prose Edda, the Rig Veda, etc.?

I have said elsewhere it's literature from another culture and you need to acclimatise yourself to it.

What I said was that the narrative technique was simple. That doesn't mean that the content is.


spin

Postcard73

I think the question here is a lot broader than just the Bible. Does any literary or artistic work have aesthetic value on its own? I personally consider aesthetic value to be determined subjectively by the person viewing the work.

Celsus

*deep sigh*

Goliath

I honestly don't get it. Why would any atheist want to defend such a horrible book as the bible?

Sincerely,

Goliath

Celsus

Do you consider the Enuma Elish to be a horrible book? Do you consider Hesiod's Work and Days to be a horrible book? What about Ovid's Metamorphoses? What about Manetho's, Herodotus', and Berossos' histories?

Joel

Hugo Holbling

May i join you?

spin

The Enuma what?


spin

The Evil One

To be "good literature" I expect it to do something more than "this happened. Then this happened. then this happened."


Agreed! A thousand times agreed! Now those works you cite give me a reason to identify with the characters which is just not there in Genesis 3.

I don't know, maybe it's a brevity thing - the text being so short and all - but we're not told anything about Adam and Eve, we're not given anything to work with. They're just names, they're not people. I can't identify with a name.

But if it is a brevity thing, then that props up what I'm saying: it's bad literature to deal with events in such a hurried and off-the-cuff manner that the reader cannot engage with what is going on.


Where you see irony, I really, really don't. Sure I could place myself in Eve's position, but all that means is I can imagine a talking snake coming and telling me to eat the fruit. What I can't do is get a good idea of how Eve felt in that position, because the text gives me nothing to work with.


I am starting to resent your implication that I am judging the Bbile (and finding it aesthetically wantign) by shallow modern standards only. I am judging it, as I have said before, by the standard of a thousand years of literature in Middle/Modern English and the great literatures of other cultures over thousands of years. As I have said, by those standards there are sections of the OT that hold up, but I find it incredible that one would consider genesis 3 to be one of them.



You know and I know that that is because of the large number of people who believe it to be true and sacred, not because of any particular literary value it may have or not have.

Oh and yes, there are plenty of other short-short works that do have literary value: they seldom attempt a four-character, multi-twist plot though.


I find characterisation in plenty of other parts of the OT - just not genesis 3. And in plenty of other ancient literature - Iliad, Beowulf et al. I apologise if you missed the fact that I used "poet" in the broader sense. The fact that I cited "Characterisation, motivation, emotion, imagery, allusion, metaphor " as tools of the "poet" might have given that away.

I don't find I have to work at it in the Iliad or Beowulf. Nor, in fact, do I have to work at it perceptibly in certain other parts of the OT (e.g. Job).



You clearly do not recall my earlier posts. I have already said that there are quite a lot of bits of the OT that I consider to have literary merit. I am just taking issue with your stance that Genesis can be said to be one of them.

I get character from the Iliad and Beowulf.

A basic introductory passage: contains much confusing, unsatisfying topic-jumping. The 120 years bit is introduced, surely at the wrong part fo the story: that comes after the flood. The Nephilim and heroes are introduced and then dropped from the story.

REmainder of this chapter is coherent.

Repeats the end of the previous chapter with the well-remarked changes from 2 to 7. I don't buy this as stylistic repetition.

Again, jumbled repetition for no discerible purpose.

This is just plain confusing. First the ark gets stuck on a mountain, then we get the other version with the birds. It's BAD EDITING creating BAD LITERATURE: quite apart from anything else, any narrative flow which the original tales may have possessed has been torn to shreds by their being patched together.

And so on and so forth: the double covenent, etc etc.


I don't agree. As I've pointed out, there is literature from the very same culture - example Job, Psalms Song of Solomon - whose aesthetic quality I find immediately accessible. So I think the reason I don't find any value in Genesis 3 is more that it's not there than I don't see it.

In the case of genesis 3, it is, though. There's a string of events. That's it. No more. Literary quality demands more than a string of events.

Goliath

It's hardly possible for me to think that any of those books are horrible, since I've never heard of them before.

Sincerely,

Goliath

spin

I get the idea that we can get nowhere. Art requires one to know something about the methods employed in that art. Art from another culture can seem obscure and uninteresting to someone who doesn't have sufficient knowledge of the methodologies involved. For example people listening to say Sibelius' 4th Symphony without an "acculturation" to the idiom wouldn't get much out of it. Someone who only knows Eminem will judge the Sibelius as being without merit. Many other examples, I'm sure you can think of.

What happens in the garden is a relatively simple narrative, but it has powerful symbolic content. I talked about the irony in the passage regarding the nakedness. Another aspect to it is that it is the normal thing for most cultures including to the Hebrew culture of the time to cover up, so clothing oneself as they did would seem the right thing to do but was in fact wrong.
Interesting, because if I hadn't mentioned Hamlet we would have been dealing with literature in which character was trivial. Next to none in Gulliver's Travels and the same for Smith, O'Brien and Julia from 1984.
You have people doing things and those things do seem reasonable, don't they? Could you have done them in those circumstances, knowing only what they knew?
Work at it a little.
Do you mean that the sentence where I thought I explained the irony wasn't clear or that I wasn't correct?

Don't you find it interesting that God knows that there is something wrong by the fact that they feel the need to cover up? that by covering up they reveal the truth? and that if they'd remained uncovered, they may have covered up better?
That doesn't mean that there is nothing there, only that you can't find anything. I have attempted to give an explanation.
Part of the reason is because of its archetypal power. I have seen the scenes represented hundreds of times, each trying to grasp as much of that power as possible and the next artist thinks that he can do it better. Stories of the period are consistently undertold.
I don't agree. But then I also like stuff that doesn't get the same following.
I'd say you get emotions, but I doubt character, ie insight into the workings of the figure's psyche.
So you also negate the literary merits of the creation, of the sacrifice of Isaac, of the sale of Joseph into Egypt and his brothers' come-uppance?
Well, ok. You seem to have a different understanding of the term from me. I explained my understanding briefly above.

When you start you approach to the flood story about four verses too early, it doesn't augur well for what follows, which includes pre-ordained complaints over the fact that the two accounts were woven together. But I'll accept that you have trouble with this fact and that you find it disturbing and you keep falling over vestiges of the threading, so it's just bad literature for you.
It seems that the major complaint is the joining together of the two sources. This is the reason for it not being coherent to you.

I must admit having worked on the text a few times, I have separated the sources and dealt with them separately.
On this I'll just have to beg to differ. Understanding of are usually requires a learning curve. The best one who doesn't know the genre can do is recognize things that are similar in the art that one already knows.
This seems to be a simple negation of what I said, repeating the claim that a "string of events" cannot in itself be considered literary. And obviously I disagree with you, so why just repeat it? The choice of the events is fundamental to any narrative. That choice is literary. Why did we need the discovery of the "crime"? Why did they feel they had to hide? In fact the only part of the story I found unsatisfying is the fact that the serpent merely appears at the right time to seduce Eve and is therefore only a plot device. The serpent's seduction is interesting with its appeal to good reason, which is sadly no defence for Eve.

The hegemony of the religion is what has given us access to such stories. Access doesn't necessitate that we should be able to understand or appreciate them without considerable effort. They are glimpses from far off and require patience to find any merits they may contain. If you don't find any, that is not necessarily a reflection of the literature's lack of content. It may simply be the reader's distance from the literature.

This is a subject which I don't think can get stretched too much further. I appreciate you don't find merit in the storytelling in Genesis, whereas I do. I don't see how we can get beyond that without lengthy analyses of the texts involved and then we may not come to any agreement. As discussion of the literary merit of Genesis is not central to my activities here, I'll probably leave the subject to you to continue or conclude.


spin