CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION The narrative holds rich promise for exposition. But is it notoriously difficult to interpret. Its difficulty begins in the aversion immediately felt for a God who will command the murder of a son. Erich Auerbach... has discerned that this text like others in Israel, is fraught with background and is presented to permit free play of interpretation. The intent is not clear. It requires some decisions by the interpreter. Walter Brueggemann, Genesis The single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open-ended dialogue.... To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, and with his whole body and deeds. (emphasis original) Mikhail Bakhtin, Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book The goal of this chapter is to lay out my project and to describe the methodology I will employ. Simply stated, the purpose of this study is to offer a plausible and responsible reading of the interaction between God and Abraham represented in that difficult yet foundational text, Gen. 22: 1-19. This narrative is often referred to as the Sacrifice of Isaac or the Aqedah ; I will refer to it as Genesis 22 in this study. My strategies for reading this interaction are drawn principally from theories of the dialogic nature of language and communication put forth by Mikhail Bakhtin. I will begin with some preliminary comments about the reason for this study. My scholarly interest in Genesis 22 began a few years ago when I participated in a small group session at a professional meeting. The participants voiced various responses to the biblical story, but the discussion soon came to be dominated by two 1

individuals who put forth opposing views. One saw the entire story through the first divine utterance, the command to sacrifice Isaac, which he saw as inexcusably horrifying, and the deity who commanded it as demonic. The other filtered the story through the second divine utterance, the reprieve from sacrifice, which he thought justified not only the dreadful test but the God who ordered it. As the two contending voices grew louder and more insistent, it struck me how this multi-layered text, so full of ambiguity and unanswered questions, resists our attempts to reduce it to one interpretation or what I latter learned Mikhail Bakhtin calls finalization : our attempt to offer a complete and exhaustive explanation of the narrative for all time, and to contain, categorize and pin down its characters forever. 1 Of course, even in the heyday of historical-critical scholarship, when biblical scholars sought to unearth the single meaning buried in a biblical text, Genesis 22 defied such attempts. For some two thousand years Genesis 22 has informed two religious traditions, 2 Jewish and later Christian, whose differing titles for the passage reveal their distinctive interpretative stances: Genesis 22 is commonly referred to as the Aqedah or the Binding of Isaac within Judaism and as the Sacrifice of Isaac within Christianity. 3 1 Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson point out that Bakhtin s sense of the unfinalizability of truth requires multiple voices and languages in potentially endless acts of exploration in Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 328. 2 The Qur an also contains a similar narrative in which Allah commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, a story that is rehearsed yearly at the end of the Hajj. However, my study is restricted to the narrative as it appears in the Hebrew Bible, the scriptures of both Jews and Christians. For a good review of Jewish and Islamic traditions on the aqedah see Mishael Maswari Caspi and Sascha Benjamin Cohen, The Binding (Aqedah) and its Transformations in Judaism and Islam: The Lambs of God (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen Biblical Press, 1995); although the title does not indicate it, Christian traditions are also covered. See also Mishael Caspi, Take Now Thy Son: The Motif of the Aqedah (Binding) in Literature (North Richland, Tex.: BIBAL Press, 2001). 3 For a classic work on Jewish traditions of the aqedah see Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial: On the Legends and Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice: The Akedah, trans. Judah Goldin (Woodstock, Vt.: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1993). For a classic work on the history of the exegesis of Gen 22 see David Lerch, Isaaks Opferung christlich gedeutet: Eine Auslegungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung, Beiträge zur Historischen Theologie 12 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1950). 2

As I considered the plethora of methodologies that scholars currently employ in reading the engagement of God and Abraham, I was struck by how few approaches take into account the multi-layered and deeply resonant language of character and narratorial discourse when reading the characters. The result, in my view, is that the characters are often rendered as flat, and their relationship, one-dimensional: Abraham as the model of radical obedience; 4 Abraham as a self-serving rogue; 5 Abraham and God as male buddies engaged in a game of one-upmanship. 6 These approaches to the text largely read out the rich ambiguity present in the discourse. To put it another way, they do not exploit Erich Auerbach s seminal insight, referred to by Brueggemann, 7 and offered over fifty years ago, that the characters are fraught with background and their relationship complex and entangled. I hoped to do the opposite and sought a reading strategy that would take advantage of the richness that characterizes the discourse and make it possible to render the characters as complex and conflicted. In Mikhail Bakhtin s theories of the dialogical nature of language and communication I found concepts and tools to do this. Genesis 22 is a highly visual text. This visuality is another aspect of the text that has not been examined very fully, but I saw it as possibly contributing to a deeper understanding of the characters and their engagement. In this study I look at how the visual dynamics inform character dynamics. Also, for over two thousand years artists 4 Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), chapter 12. 5 Danna Nolan Fewell and David M. Gunn, Keeping the Promise, in Gender, Power and Promise: The Subject of the Bible s First Story (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993); Idem, Abraham and Sarah: Genesis 11-12, in Narrative in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 6 Phillip R. Davies, Male Bonding: A Tale of Two Buddies, in Whose Bible is it Anyway? JSOT Sup 204 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1995). 7 Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982), 185. The classic work on Genesis 22 by Auerbach is Erich Auerbach, Odysseus Scar, in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 3-23. 3

have been astute readers of this text, attuned to its visuality. Their visual commentary fleshed out in their works of art sharpens our reading of the visual elements in the text and further deepens our reading of the interaction between God and Abraham. In this study I propose one way of inviting three artists, Rembrandt, Caravaggio and Chagall, into the discussion of Genesis 22. Aims and Thesis The aim of this study is to provide a plausible and responsible reading of the interaction between God and Abraham represented in Gen. 22:1-19. My focus will be on narratorial and character discourse and on the visual dynamics in the text, because I see Genesis 22 as a text that is designed to be listened to and looked at. I am drawn to examine the character and narratorial discourse because it is full of reused language that evokes the earlier dialogues between God and Abraham and makes the speech of Genesis 22 more ambiguous and interaction between the characters more complicated than is often read. Yet, while the language is multi-layered and multi-voiced, the visuality of the text also seems central. This visuality is apparent on a number of different levels. First, I would argue that visual dynamics affect character dynamics. The engagement between God and Abraham depends on sight at crucial points in the narrative, and therefore it is valuable to examine how sight functions in the communication between them. Second, sight plays a role for readers as well, because the narrator positions us outside the characters and positions us to watch the scenes as they unfold. Third, while God speaks to Abraham in the text, the man s response is near silent, described by the narrator in a series of scenes that lend themselves to 4

visualization. I believe we can discern conflicting responses in Abraham s actions Abraham s actions and gestures are as fraught as any of the words spoken. Fourth, the narrator creates an arresting image at the climax of the narrative: Abraham, knife in hand, standing over Isaac. Artists have variously fleshed out this moment and God s response; their paintings can be placed in conversation with the narrator s image to allow us to see the conflicting ways of reading the narrator s image. I will use three paintings, one each by Rembrandt (1606-1669), 8 Caravaggio (1573-1610), 9 and Chagall (1887-1985). 10 The paintings are all entitled the Sacrifice of Isaac. My overall strategy will be to exploit the wealth of ambiguity inherent in the character and narratorial discourse to portray God and Abraham verbally and visually engaged over the issue of sacrificing Isaac, anticipating and listening for the other s response, whether verbalized or displayed silently. In addition, I will make audible the points of view of various voices in the text, both characters and the narrator, as well as demonstrate how the narrator tendentiously situates God (and the reader) to watch and react to the sacrifice. To achieve this I will use a Bakhtinian approach to engage both the narrative and the three works of art. While my methodology also engages recent biblical scholarship and includes Mieke Bal s insights on reading visual art narratively, my reading strategies are drawn fundamentally from the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin. 8 Rembrandt van Rijn, Sacrifice of Isaac. Oil in canvas; 193 x 133 cm. Signed and dated: Rembrandt, 1635. St. Petersburg, Hermitage. 9 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Sacrifice of Isaac, 104 x 135 cm, around 1630. Florence, Uffizi, No. 4659. Cat. 1926. 10 Marc Chagall, Sacrifice of Isaac. Oil on canvas; 230 x 235 cm, 1960-66, Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall. 5

Now, having discussed my approach to the narrative, I can articulate my thesis: I see and will portray God and Abraham engaged in an intense interaction in which Abraham silently obeys but at the same time borrows God s former tactics to set out a visual argument (a display, if you will) to convince God to reconsider the sacrifice. In addition, I will read the narrator s language as an attempt to persuade the reader to view the sacrifice as problematic because he tendentiously represents the interaction as a severe test in which a father is called upon to kill his only son. To elaborate this thesis more fully: I see Genesis 22 as the culminating dialogue of an ongoing conversation between God and Abraham that begins in Genesis 12. As a dialogue Genesis 22 is climactic but also retrospective. The verbal and visual dynamics apparent in character dynamics depend on the fact that the promises have been spoken and pointed out; as much as speaking and hearing, pointing out and seeing has characterized the nature of the communication about the promises. In Genesis 22 the dialogue begins with God s command to Abraham to sacrifice the son that God has miraculously given him and Sarah. By giving this command God engages in a dialogue with Abraham, to which Abraham responds with a series of silent and, I will argue, purposeful, actions that can be read simultaneously as obedience to God s command and as resistance to be viewed by God and to change God s mind. Abraham sets out to show God what the sacrifice of Isaac looks like, and to challenge God to consider the implications in light of God s previous promises. Abraham obeys God s command, but on his way to Moriah he tries to move God to rescind it. Abraham does this, not by verbal argument as attempted on behalf of Sodom, but by borrowing God s own tactics, dramatically putting forth a visual argument, making God 6

look at Isaac, as God had previously directed Abraham to look: at the land, at the stars as a stand-in for descendents. The land itself is a land that God will show and then does show Abraham. Sight accompanies the promise giving; it is part of the context of communication between God and Abraham. Sight is not only a way that God and Abraham gather information; it is one crucial way they communicate with one another. In the climactic scene the narrator presents a stark and disturbing image of Abraham, knife in hand, standing over Isaac ready to slaughter him. It is this image that two of the artists, Rembrandt and Caravaggio, render in opposite ways Rembrandt glorifies the sacrifice, while Caravaggio depicts its horror. Yet each offers an original way of seeing this climactic moment and highlights the conflicting ways of reading the narrator s image. What God sees leads him, I will argue, to countermand the order to sacrifice Isaac and to redefine the notion of a religious obligation. God renews the promises, describing them again with a visual image, so that the two images of land and stars merge into one image of landscape. God also redefines piety; that is, God shifts from describing it as an act of not withholding the son (Gen. 22:12) to the stance of listening to God s voice (Gen. 22:18). Yet at the same time, the image and God s words are dialogized by earlier divine words of warning (Gen. 15:13). Abraham is also shaped by his engagement with God. We watch him take up God s language (originally borrowed from Sarah) and verbally claim Isaac as his son. We also observe a once myopic Abraham derive insight from sight as he sees/recognizes that the lamb is to be the sacrificial victim instead of his son. Finally 7

we see an Abraham, who once formerly questioned God s words and intentions (due to the long delay in the promises), name God as one who sees and provides. The narrator s closing words, however, introduce an element of ambiguity as he depicts Abraham descending the mountain without Isaac and so leave the reader wondering about the actual fate of Isaac and the promises. Again, an artist s perspective on the uncertain fate of Isaac enriches our reading as Chagall s work fleshes out the conflicting messages in God s reissued promises. Now that I have articulated my aims and elaborated the thesis, before turning to Bakhtin and setting out my methodology, there are a number of procedures I will follow that need to be explained. First, while three of the great world religions share the story of Abraham s sacrifice of his son, only two of them, Judaism and Christianity, share the same written text, namely, the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. The third, Islam, has its own text, the Qur an, which includes a similar yet distinctly different narrative. Since my reading attends to the discourse of Genesis 22, my engagement is limited to that shared Jewish-Christian text (and restricted to current scholarship on it). The second issue regards the question of how I refer to God. Some feminist biblical scholars make a point of referring to God as he when speaking of God as a character in the biblical text. 11 I follow this practice here, although perhaps guided more by Bakhtin s theory on this point. In a Bakhtinian approach one s gender should be as important as any other specific aspect of ourselves that contributes to our uniqueness. 12 In Genesis 22 11 See, for example, Fewell and Gunn, Keeping the Promise, 19, and W. Lee Humphreys, The Character of God in the Book of Genesis: A Narrative Appraisal (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 3-4. 12 Although Bakhtin himself did not pay as much attention to gender as we might like, feminists have found his theories compatible with their interests. See for example the volume of essays by Karen 8

and the Abraham narratives in general, God is referred to by male pronouns (i.e., verbs declined as masculine singular) and this specificity of gender will figure into my analysis. However, when I refer to God as a deity in the world outside the text, I will use inclusive language. Finally, all translations are my own unless noted otherwise. Mikhail Bakhtin: Dialogism and Utterance Since Bakhtin s theories form the basis of my methodology, I need to elaborate those concepts most relevant to this work. After brief introductory comments on the man himself, I explain Bakhtin s concepts of dialogism and utterance. After each section I discuss how I will use Bakhtin s insights to read the character interaction represented in Genesis 22. Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) was a Russian thinker and philosopher who actively participated in the intellectual ferment of 1920 s Russia, publishing several works, some apparently in collaboration with a group of close colleagues. However, his career prospects greatly diminished as the Soviet regime became repressive; although he managed to survive exile and to continue writing, his views were often out of favor with the authoritarian state. Later, in the thaw of the 1960 s, Bakhtin and his ideas were rediscovered by students and his writings were reintroduced to a larger audience, first in Russia and then the West. His books and notes continue to be translated, circulated and critically evaluated to this day. Bakhtin s writing reflects his diverse interests. His theories cover a range of disciplines: philosophy, aesthetics, linguistics and science. The theories most significant for this Hohne and Helen Wussow, eds. A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Theory and Bakhtin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 1-207. 9

study are his insights on the dynamics of language and consciousness which he brings to bear on literary theory. A number of biblical scholars have fruitfully appropriated Bakhtin s theories and have demonstrated his value in reading biblical narrative. 13 This study is indebted to gains they have made. Dialogism Dialogism is a vast concept and is interwoven into Bakhtin s thought on many topics; here I explain only those insights pertinent to this study. Michael Holquist describes dialogism as a pragmatically oriented theory of knowledge... that seeks to grasp human behavior through the use humans make of language. 14 It is an epistemology that depends on the reconceived notions of language and the self that arose in the early twentieth century in the disciplines of philosophy and science. Many scholars regard dialogism as the foundational concept on which Bakhtin s thought is based and employ the term as the umbrella under which to discuss his various theories on the dialogic nature of reality and language. Dialogism is a term coined by others; Bakhtin himself never used it. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist offer this definition of the term: 13 See Robert Polzin, Moses and the Deuteronomist: A Literary Study of the Deuteronomic History, Part I: Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges (New York: Seabury, 1980); Idem, Samuel and the Deuteronomist: A Literary Study of the Deuteronomic History, Part 2: 1 Samuel (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989); Idem, David and the Deuteronomist: A Literary Study of the Deuteronomic History Part 3: 2 Samuel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Barbara Green, Mikhail Bakhtin and Biblical Scholarship: An Introduction (Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000); Idem, How Are the Mighty Fallen?: A Dialogical Study of King Saul in 1 Samuel, JSOT sup 365 (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003); Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Idem, The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Carol A. Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 14 Michael Holoquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (New York: Routledge, 1990), 15. 10

Dialogism is the characteristic epistemological mode of a world dominated by heteroglossia. Everything means, is understood, as a part of a greater whole there is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others. Which will affect the other, how it will do so and in what degree is what is actually settled at the moment of utterance. This dialogic imperative, mandated by the pre-existence of the language world relative to any of its current inhabitants, insures that there can be no actual monologue. 15 Holquist and Katerina Clark point out that dialogism is not simply another literary theory or a philosophy of language; rather, it is an account of relations between people and between persons and things that cuts across religious, political and aesthetic boundaries. 16 Bakhtin s insights about self-other relations are thus fundamental to his theories about language and literature. Holquist names alterity as the foundation for Bakhtin s conception of the self. He writes, in dialogism, the very capacity to have a consciousness is based on otherness. 17 Barbara Green remarks that Bakhtin s notion that our encounter with the other is essential in constructing a self is the unifying insight around which the diverse concepts comprising dialogism gather. 18 In this interaction between selves, dialogism assumes that there are always at least two voices, possibly themselves braided, each with its own viewpoint, set of experiences, and responding from its unique place. Bakhtin describes how we dialogically engage each other in an ongoing process in which each approaches the other with empathy, 19 while simultaneously retaining our individuality and external 15 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 426. 16 Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge: Belknap Harvard University Press, 1984), 348 17 Michael Holquist, Dialogism, 18. 18 Barbara Green, How Are the Mighty Fallen?, 25. 19 Bakhtin s term for this was sympathetic co-understanding or co-experiencing. As Green notes, How Are the Mighty Fallen?, fn. 21, 20, Bakhtin did not like the term empathy, yet it is a useful shorthand. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity, in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 81-87 for his explanation of the concept of sympathetic co-experiencing. 11

perspective ( outsidedness ) made possible by our surplus of vision. 20 In other words, we approach the other by listening sympathetically and respectfully, never merging with the other entirely, but returning to our own position outside of them. From this outside position we acquire a surplus of vision we see what the other cannot see, for example, the back of his head. It is from our surplus of vision that we provide each other with the evaluative insights that foundationally shape and change us both. 21 Morson and Emerson remark, outsideness creates the possibility of dialogue. 22 Bakhtin names discourse as the primary place to see the dialogical nature of reality at work. For Bakhtin language, whether in life or literature, is dialogic, that is, it is multi-voiced, multi-layered and full of words of ever-shifting meaning; his strategies center on how speech intersects speech. He identified the utterance, rather than the sentence, as the base unit of communication. I will discuss the utterance more fully in a separate section, but here I will sketch it briefly in order to distinguish the three senses in which Bakhtin discusses dialogic reality. An utterance (ranging from a single word to a novel) is what one person says to another; it assumes an author and a listener. Unlike a sentence, an utterance is always addressed to someone; it is ended by a pause that anticipates, invites, and awaits a response. It is a speech shaped dialogically: I shape my utterance in anticipation of what you will say, as your response shapes my original utterance. It is formed on the 20 Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: University Press, 1990), 53-54. 21 To be thus dialogically engaged is how we author a self, that is, each of us authors the other but also is authored by the other. However in this study, I am less concerned with the fact that God and Abraham are authoring selves than in the nature of their dialogic engagement and how they are shaped in this one interaction in Gen 22. 22 Morson and Emerson, Creation of a Prosaics, 55. 12

border between interlocutors in conversation. An utterance assumes that there is a semantically common context shared by two speakers. Bakhtin defined an utterance as what is said and what is left unsaid but assumed. 23 Intonation is often present but the shared context can be extraverbal, for example, understanding another s utterance may depend on sight. An utterance always offers an evaluation. And for Bakhtin an evaluation always has ethical implications and assumes answerability, that is, owning and taking responsibility for one s choices. 24 Having outlined the characteristics of an utterance, now it is possible to discuss the various ways in which Bakhtin used the term dialogue. Bakhtin employed the term in at least three different senses, often shifting between the three without alerting the reader that he was doing so. Morson and Emerson attempt to impose clarity by defining the three aspects. 25 In the first sense every utterance is dialogic in the ways I have outlined above. Every utterance is shared by a speaker and a listener who have joint ownership of it and who are foundationally shaped as they interact dialogically. The second sense Morson and Emerson identify is that an utterance can be, to a varying degree, monologic or dialogic. In a monologic utterance only one voice, one point of view, is perceptible. To be dialogic as opposed to monologic two distinct voices must be heard within one utterance. A parody of an official statement is an example of an utterance that is dialogical in the second sense; it expresses a point of view that contends with the viewpoint of the official statement. In the third sense, dialogue is considered a global concept, a view of the world and of truth. Bakhtin saw the 23 Clark and Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, 207. 24 Morson and Emerson, Creation of a Prosaics, 134. 25 Morson and Emerson, Creation of a Prosaics, 130-133, in addition see 49-54, 234-37. 13

necessity of having a theory about the world and truth that reflects the dialogic nature of reality. He put forth the novels of Dostoevsky as best representing the dialogic nature of reality. 26 This third sense of the dialogic insists on the situated quality of truth, the importance of the distinctive point of view which finds itself in relationship with other distinct viewpoints as over against the realm of impersonal and universal propositions. 27 This sense gives rise to the polyphony that Bakhtin found so characteristic of Dostoevsky s novels. 28 Yet even while Bakhtin points to discourse as the best place to view the dialogic nature of reality, he hints that language cannot fully describe that reality and qualifies the idea that dialogue is essentially verbally expressed : In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, and with his whole body and deeds. 29 This view is supported by Holquist, who asserts that Bakhtin recognized that in life discourse alone is not sufficient to cover all that occurs in dialogical relationships. 30 Sight and gestures can also be significant aspects of communication. We can extend Bakhtin s insights to literary texts. These two ideas the importance of discourse, and the importance of sight and gesture have ramifications for reading biblical narrative. First, it means that we read attending to what characters say to each other, and what they and the narrator say about each other, rather than trying to discern their psychological state or their motivations. Second, we can also watch what they do, and consider how their actions and gestures 26 Morson and Emerson, Creation of a Prosaics, 60. 27 Green, How Are the Mighty Fallen?, 25. 28 Green, How Are the Mighty Fallen?, 25; Morson and Emerson, Creation of a Prosaics, 61. 29 Mikhail Bakhtin, Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book (1961) in Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 293. 30 Holquist, Dialogism, 62. 14

communicate meaning. Third, we can consider the role of sight in their dialogical interaction. Dialogism and Genesis 22 Bakhtin s theories about self-other interaction have significant implications for reading the interaction between God and Abraham in Genesis 22. Bakhtin, having derived his theories from various aspects of the dialogical nature of reality and language, developed them with literary texts; consequently, he did not view characters in formalist terms, as mere types or elements of the plot. Instead, he envisioned them as self-aware consciousnesses, each with its own voice, expressing distinct points of views, contending or agreeing but foundationally shaping one another in their interaction. I will read the characters of God and Abraham listening simultaneously and actively anticipating and responding to each other, influencing each other as they dialogically interact over the issue of sacrificing Isaac. As Green points out, appropriating Bakhtin s theories has consequences for readers and how we position characters; she writes: Characters and narrator alike will achieve their positions and make their meaning while contending with each other. The readerly task will involve not only discerning a way amid the cacophony but of claiming her own path forward as she construes speech in her particular way. The reliable and omniscient narrator is displaced from an erstwhile natural authority, as are other voices long accustomed to dominate. 31 Two voices that often dominate a biblical narrative are the voice of God and that of the narrator. Bakhtin allows us to view each of their voices as simply one among others in 31 Green, How Are the Mighty Fallen?, 27. 15

the text. Therefore I will treat God as character who, like the other characters, has a voice we can discern and viewpoints we can hear. Also, rather than assuming that the narrator is omniscient and has special knowledge about the characters or privileged access to the mind of God-as-character, I will view the narrator s voice as one among the narrative s distinct voices. 32 One of the consequences of this reading strategy is that the narrator is not seen as neutrally dispensing information but as expressing a point of view. Bakhtin did not focus on the role of readers but, as many others have done, I will extend Bakhtin s insights to readers and assume that readers can, and often do, participate by responding to the discourse of the characters and narrators in the text. As a reader, I will make certain choices, leaving others behind as I construct the characters and their interaction. Utterance Previously, I briefly introduced the utterance; I will now explain this concept in more detail. Bakhtin rejected the sentence as the primary unit of language and instead chose the utterance as the fundamental building block of communication. As Holquist asserts, utterance (vyskazyvanie) is the topic of analysis when language is conceived as 32 Here I am following Green, Mikhail Bakhtin and Biblical Scholarship, fn. 41, 48, who summarizing Sue Vice s insights and clarification of Bakhtin s notion of the narrator/author, describes the narrator as an authorial construct, part of the artistry of the text, a voice to be reckoned with; it is not found as an impersonal and reliable reporter but as one of the voices performing the text. Sue Vice discusses these issues in her book Introducing Bakhtin, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 4-5, 41, 67, 126-27, 146. However, Polzin, whose methodology is also based on Bakhtin, in his book Samuel and the Deuteronomist, 19, allows the narrator a qualified omniscience. 16

dialogue, the fundamental unit of investigation for anyone studying communication as opposed to language alone. 33 Bakhtin s description of an utterance takes shape in his polemical debates with the formalists, and consequently we come to learn what an utterance is as much by what it is not as by what it is. An utterance is not to be equated with the sentence, in the sense that the sentence is a syntactical unit. In contrast, an utterance (ranging from very short to very long) is considered the base unit of social interaction. An utterance is therefore thoroughly relational. A sentence can be a mere statement spoken without thought of a reply, but this is impossible with an utterance. An utterance must have an engaged author: It is always addressed to someone by someone and expects a response; Bakhtin refers to this as addressivity. I construct my utterance dialogically, that is, in anticipation of your particular response, as your response too is simultaneously shaped by my original utterance. Therefore an utterance is marked by a pause rather than a period; it indicates a relinquishing of the floor as the first speaker awaits the answer of the person addressed. Yet an utterance is never original; it is always an answer. 34 As Bakhtin commented, none of us is the biblical Adam, dealing only with virgin and still unnamed objects, giving them names for the first time; the topics of our utterances have already been articulated, disputed, elucidated, and evaluated in various ways. 35 Any utterance is grounded in the particularities of our shared speech (e.g. grammar and syntax); it is concrete, specific to our common circumstance; it is unique and unrepeatable. This shared context is often extraverbal, and includes sight and 33 Holquist, Dialogism, 59-60. 34 Holquist, Dialogism, 60. 35 Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 93. 17

gestures. We can imagine a situation in which no words are spoken and a simple friendly wave or angry gesture communicates volumes. 36 Bakhtin defines utterance as what is both said and unsaid, that is, what is assumed. 37 Clark and Holquist stress that intonation forms the immediate interface between what is said and not said, and contend that, more than any other aspect of utterance, [intonation] stitches its repeatable, merely linguistic stuff to the unrepeatable social situation in which it is spoken. 38 Morson and Emerson, though, point out that gestures often function as intonation does, and that seemingly meaningless words and gestures may be complete, and highly expressive, utterances. 39 Bakhtin offered particular strategies for analyzing discourse, but not for wordless gestures. Emerson criticizes Bakhtin for failing to take account of dialogic 36 Holquist writes that Bakhtin makes clear that verbal discourse alone does not sufficiently account for all possible ways of interacting dialogically in life. Holquist then relates this illuminating example (which may or may not be from Bakhtin; it is in a work attributed to Voloshinov): There are two men seated in a room. One looks at the other as says, Well. The other does not reply. Bakhtin says that even if we know the intonation of the word, for example, that Well expresses surprise or indignation or some other emotion, we still do not know the meaning of the utterance as a whole. We still do not understand what the two understand, what the utterance means to them. What we lack, Bakhtin writes, is the extraverbal context that clues us in to the meaning. In this case, he says that the extraverbal context includes (along with their common understanding of the situation and their common evaluation) their common spatial purview which in this example is the room, the window and so on. Bakhtin then fills in for us the extraverbal context that we lack. He writes: At the time the colloquy took place, both interlocutors looked up at the window and saw that it had begun to snow; both knew that it was already May and that it was high time for spring to come; finally, both were sick and tired of the protracted winter they were both looking forward to spring and both were bitterly disappointed by the late snowfall. On this jointly seen (snowflakes outside the window), jointly known (the time of the year May, and unanimously evaluated (winter wearied of, spring looked forward to) on all this the utterance directly depends, all this is seized in its actual, living import is its very sustenance. And yet all this remains without verbal specification or articulation. The snowflakes remain outside the window; the date, on the page of a calendar; the evaluations, in the psyche of the speaker; and nevertheless, all this is assumed in the word well. (Punctuation as in Holquist.) This passage by V.N. Voloshinov, Discourse in life and discourse in art in Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, 98-99, is quoted in Holquist, Dialogism, 62-63. 37 Clark and Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, 207. 38 Clark and Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, 207. 39 Morson and Emerson, Creation of a Prosaics, 135. 18

situations in Dostoevsky in which gestures, not words, are the principal means of communication. She writes: More significant is that Bakhtin has also almost nothing to say about the centrally important, affirmative, godly dialogic situations if they happen to be wordless. Among these crucial scenes are Raskolnikov and Sonya on the banks of the Siberian River in the epilogue of Crime and Punishment, Prince Myshkin s meaningless babble as he embraces a stunned Rogozhin over Nastasya Filippovna s corpse at the end of The Idiot, and most famously Christ kissing the Grand Inquisitor after having listened, in silence, to that brilliant and lengthy diatribe. In Bakhtin s readings, however, only the interaction of one verbal utterance with another verbal utterance can be adequate to the most subtle and multilayered messages. 40 There is some indication that late in life Bakhtin began to attend to these wordless dialogic moments in literature. In a late journal entry he jotted this note: The unuttered truth in Dostoevsky (Christ s kiss). The problem of silence. Irony as a special kind of substitute for silence. 41 I think it is more accurate to say that while Bakhtin did not offer specific theories about gestures he was aware that they had the potential to be read dialogically. This is evident in the quote below where he mentions Dostoevsky s remarkable ability to represent the dialogic nature of not only speech but of gestures as well. Bakhtin writes: In every voice he could hear two contending voices... in every gesture he detected confidence and lack of confidence simultaneously; he perceived the profound ambiguity, even multiple ambiguity, of every phenomenon. 42 I think therefore that it is possible to extend Bakhtin s theories about utterance to include wordless gestures, as long as we mark our moves carefully and remember that 40 Caryl Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 132. 41 Mikhail Bakhtin, From Notes Made in 1970-71 in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 148. 42 Bakhtin, Dostoevsky s Polyphonic Novel, in Problems of Dostoevsky s Poetics, 30. 19

they are narrated gestures. That is, they are always double-voiced: They bear not only the viewpoint of the character but also the views of the narrator who describes them to us. Yet words are, in most cases, what utterances are composed of, so it is important to summarize the significant features of the word within a Bakhtinian conception of language. First, the constitutive feature of the word is that it bears a multiplicity of meanings. 43 Second, a word s meaning does not reside in the word itself, or in the speaker, but is derived dialogically through the process of active responsive understanding; in other words, meaning is the effect of interaction between speaker and listener. 44 Third, all words (and utterances) are evaluative, and the most obvious example is expressive intonation. A word is a vehicle for intonation and value judgment. 45 As suggested earlier, sometimes intonation is the only means for determining a speaker s evaluative stance; and as we noted, gestures can serve to 43 V. N. Voloshinov (Bakhtin), Theme and Meaning, in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 101. 44 Voloshinov, Theme and Meaning, 102-103. 45 Voloshinov, Theme and Meaning, 103-4, quotes this paragraph from Dostoevsky s Diary of a Writer to make his point. Dostoevsky describes the interaction between six friends whose only verbal exchange is one word, an obscenity, spoken by six different persons with six different intonations. Voloshinov s point is that the word carries the intonation and hence the value judgments of six different speakers. Here is a section of the quotation: Here is what happened, first, one of these fellows voices his noun shrilly and emphatically by way of expressing his utterly disdainful denial of some point that had been in general contention just prior. A second fellow repeats this very same noun in response to the first fellow, but now in an altogether different tone and sense to wit, in the sense that he fully doubted the veracity of the first fellow s denial. A third fellow waxes indignant at the first one, sharply and heatedly sallying into the conversation and shouting at him that very same noun, but now in a pejorative, abusive sense. The second fellow, indignant at the third for being offensive, himself sallies back in and cuts the latter short to the effect; What the hell do you think you re doing, butting in like that?! Me and Fil ka were having a nice quiet talk and just like that you come along and start cussing him out! And in fact, this whole train of thought he conveyed by emitting just that very same time-honored word, that same extremely laconic designation of a certain item, and nothing more save that he also raised his hand and grabbed the second fellow by the shoulder [italics mine]... And so, without having uttered one other word, they repeated just this one, but obviously beloved, little word of theirs six times in a row, one after the other and they understood one another perfectly. 20

indicate it as well. Morson and Emerson remark, words remember earlier contexts and what is often considered their connotation is really the effect of manifold voices. 46 Words bear and carry their previous contexts generating new meaning as they are borrowed and repositioned by new speakers. A speaker or reader often reintones another s words, and if in the process the presupposed values of its previous use are called into question a word acquires a new accent, much as, e.g., the word sentimental was reaccented in the nineteenth century. 47 This process of reaccentuation, where speakers add to and alter the already-spoken quality of the word, is crucial in shaping a word s evolution. 48 For Bakhtin all language is reused language. Therefore it is important in a Bakhtinian approach to pay careful attention to the places words have resided: who has used them and in what contexts, and to listen for reintonation or reaccentuation in the process of reuse. Green remarks, where words have lived before we reach for them, or where they still dwell as we employ them, makes all the difference in the choices for constructing meaning. She also points out that as we construct meaning dialogically, we must remember that words are not owned by the speaker who uses them, but are co-owned and co-shaped; this makes discourse deeply communal and social. 49 A related point is that discourse is not only social but also historically grounded, reflecting the concrete particularities of its time and place. Any utterance or word is saturated with its actual historical time, place, culture and social factors. In a narrative 46 Morson and Emerson, Creation of a Prosaics, 139. 47 Morson and Emerson offer this example in Creation of a Prosaics, 139. 48 Morson and Emerson, Creation of a Prosaics, 139. 49 Green, How Are the Mighty Fallen?, 270. Green contrasts Bakhtin s views with the related stance of intertextuality where choices for constructing meaning reside with the reader. She comments, 270, Bakhtin's sense of reuse is more intentional on the part of author and characters, presumably for a reader as well. 21

like Genesis 22 it is difficult to discern cues that give clues to its concrete historical or cultural situation, but Bakhtin would maintain those hints are there even though they may be hard for us to determine. Though the historical circumstances relevant to Genesis 22 will not be so focal as they sometimes are in studies on this text, I will include useful information when possible. There is one last point about utterance to make here, and that is how Bakhtin s view of the dialogic nature of language influences how he understands characterization. Bakhtin spoke of a character having a character zone. A character s zone is constructed by the discourse of the characters and the narrator: what a character says, including what he says about himself and what the narrator says and other characters say to and about him. The zone can travel with a character but the boundary is ever changing as the character s speech intersects with the speech of another, and as the context shifts. Utterance and Genesis 22 Because I am constructing the represented interaction between God and Abraham in Genesis 22 as a dialogical engagement, I will be focusing on the utterances of the characters and narrator. Listening to their utterances, it will be possible to detect their voices and their points of view on the issue of sacrificing Isaac. I will attend to who addresses whom, consider the context of their utterances, and examine the reused language they employ that often makes their communication doubled and ambiguous. The divine voice addresses Abraham three times (vv. 2, 11-12, 16-18) and we can read these words as doubled by the language of their earlier conversations. The narrator 22

describes Abraham s response (vv. 3-10, 13, 19); however, reading Abraham s intense gestures as utterances will reveal how it is possible to construct his response as conflicted and multilayered. It is also possible to hear the narrator s viewpoint on the sacrifice in the words he chooses to narrate the interaction. In addition, paying attention to reused language will make audible the voice of Sarah who is conspicuously absent, her words borrowed by the males and reintoned for their own purposes. Mieke Bal on Visual Textuality There is another theoretic piece to include in this discussion of utterance. In this study I will consider paintings portraying the sacrifice of Isaac as utterances in color and line. A painting is an artist s visually rendered response to the text and to the viewpoints put forth in it as surely as any spoken or written answer or rejoinder. Bakhtin did not speak about paintings as utterances; however, in concluding his discussion of how dialogical relationships are possible among various kinds of utterances, he states that dialogic relations can exist between the images of two different art forms. He writes: In conclusion, we remind the reader that dialogic relationships in the broad sense are also possible among different intelligent phenomena, provided that these phenomena are expressed in some semiotic material. Dialogical relationships are possible, for example, among images belonging to different art forms. But such relationships already exceed the limits of metalinguistics. 50 A Bakhtinian approach thus allows us to place an artist s visual image in dialogue with a narrated verbal image so that the paintings dialogize the image in the text. Bakhtin offers no hints on how to do this. Mieke Bal, however, has theorized 50 Bakhtin, Discourse in Dostoevsky, in Problems of Dostoevsky s Poetics, 184-185. 23

extensively about how to read visual and verbal images together, and I will borrow one of her concepts: visual textuality. By visual textuality Bal means that we should read visual texts narratively for the stories they tell. 51 We do this, Bal argues, reading narratively by means of the visual elements, that is, by looking at the narrative the line, color, and composition relates. She contrasts this approach to viewing paintings with what she calls iconographic reading. To understand Bal s approach we need to say a few words about how her concept of narrativity relates to iconography. Bal s notion of reading visual works for their narrative calls into question the iconographic reading that she perceives as a predominant reading strategy in the visual arts. 52 Reading iconographically is problematic for Bal because it is essentially a verbal and antivisual strategy that encourages us to ignore the story in paint in favor of the written narrative that is its pretext. 53 The problem, Bal contends, is that we tend to overread the written narrative into the picture and underread the visual elements on the canvas. 54 That is, we project the biblical narrative onto the canvas or more precisely our interpretation of the narrative instead of seeing the narrative fleshed out before our eyes. Bal, however, does not reject iconographic reading entirely. Rather she views it as a powerful discursive tool that facilitates recognition and guards against doxa. Bal defines doxa as a culturally dominant reading that is often gender-biased. She proposes 51 Bal explains her concept of visual textuality throughout her book Reading Rembrandt : Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). My elaboration of the concept is drawn largely from chapter 5. 52 Iconography is a method developed by Erwin Panofsky. He redefined the concept of iconography, pushing it beyond its minimalist task of identifying symbols to explore the development of an artist s theme in a piece of work. Panofsky s classic works on iconography and iconology are Meaning in the Visual Arts, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955) and Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Icon Editions/Harper & Row, 1972). 53 Bal, Reading Rembrandt, 181. 54 See Bal, Reading Rembrandt, 181-207, especially p. 187. 24