The extreme compactness of biblical narrative is likely to strike almost any modern reader. Some, naively, will attribute it to the relatively rudimentary state of ancient literature that lacks the means to elaborate the details of the stories it tells. The last several decades of literary analysis of the Bible have shown that this is by no means the case. Still, this is not the kind of narrative with which most modern readers are familiar. At least since the eighteenth century the predominant reading matter for narrative literature has been novels, and they typically proceed through a rich accumulation of descriptive details, narratorial comment, and extended dialogue. There is nothing like such novelistic abundance in the Bible. Thomas Mann deployed four volumes and a few thousand pages to tell the story of Joseph and his brothers, while the biblical narrative with great effectiveness makes do with thirteen brief chapters. What is impressive is how the Hebrew writers were able to convey a fullness in the evocation of emotions, relationships, and motives in just a few words, often only a single brief sentence, or even the strategic choice of one term. I will begin with a moment that illustrates the breathtaking efficiency of the Hebrew writers in dispensing with narrative exposition. When Moses flees from Egypt to Midian after killing an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew, he arrives at a well where he rescues seven young women confronted by hostile shepherds. The girls rush home and report to their father, “An Egyptian man rescued us from the hands of the shepherds” (Exodus 2:19). How do they know that he is Egyptian? Presumably because he is clean-shaven while the sundry Semitic males to the north and east of Egypt were bearded, and also because he would have been wearing regal Egyptian garments, since he would have had to flee Egypt abruptly in order to escape arrest and possible execution. If you imagine how a novelist might have handled this narrative information, it might read something like this: “Moses stood on the hilltop looking down toward the valley below, where he could make out people gathered around a well. His fine linen robe covered with dust and splattered with mud after his arduous journey on foot from the south, he leaned on his staff as he began the steep descent down into the valley. Drawing near, he could hear harsh shouts and see a group of young women being driven off from the well.” This is certainly not the way of biblical narrative. All we need to know is conveyed in two small words, ’ish ‘ivri, “an Egyptian man.” Since biblical narrative repeatedly works with thematic keywords, this takes us back to the previous episode of the killing of an Egyptian, when Moses saw “an Egyptian man striking a Hebrew man” (Exodus 2:11). His identification here by the Midianite girls as an Egyptian man then leads us to ponder: what, in fact, is Moses? Outwardly, he is an Egyptian man and has been raised as such in Pharaoh’s court, but inwardly he is a Hebrew man, and he has seen the man being beaten as one “of his brothers.” In just two words, we are given much to think about. I will now proceed to more complex uses of brevity. In 2 Samuel, when David negotiates a peace agreement with Abner, the commander of the Saulide forces with whom he has been warring, David stipulates that his first wife, Michal the daughter of Saul, must be sent back to him. David had to flee from her father, who was bent on killing him, he has not seen her for years, and in the interim he has acquired two wives and is on his way to creating a small harem. It seems clear that his motive in insisting on the return of Michal is not love but political calculation: the public display of the daughter of the previous king as his wife will strengthen the legitimacy of his claim to the throne. Meanwhile, Saul has married off Michal to a certain Paltiel, an act of questionable legality because she was already married to David. The obvious intention was to effect a kind of erasure of David’s marriage to Michal. No information is given about Paltiel beyond his name and marital status. Neither Paltiel nor Michal has any choice in their separation because they have been ordered to comply by the powerful military commander Abner. This is all we are told about the parting of the spouses: “And her husband went with her, weeping as he went after her, as far as Bachurim. And Abner said to him, ‘Go back!’ And he went back” (2 Samuel 3:16). No narrative report is given of the marriage between Paltiel and Michal. However it evolved, Paltiel clearly has come to love Michal, and it is plausible that she has returned his love. All this is poignantly conveyed in his wordless weeping as he accompanies her on her departure. Note that at first he is walking “with” her but then “after” her, as she, presumably led away by Abner, is taken off to resume her position as David’s wife. Abner’s brusque command to Paltiel to turn back cannot be disobeyed. Michal has been living with a man who really loved her, something David may never have done, perhaps not even in the early days of their marriage. In this way a few words evoke a domestic tragedy. More than two and a half millennia after they were written, they express, without the slightest elaboration of detail, the pain of loss that we all can understand when a beloved spouse is violently taken away forever. The great penetrating account of this kind of narrative was offered by Erich Auerbach in the seminal first chapter of his Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. (The German scholar wrote it between 1942 and 1945 in wartime exile in Istanbul; it was published in German in 1946 and in English in 1953.) His memorable coinage, fraught with background,
The Power of Succinctness
