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This book is described on its cover as ‘a state-of-the-art anthology, offering critical treatments of both the Bible’s narratives and topics related to the Bible’s narrative construction’. This is a helpful summary of what is covered in this book. It is wide ranging and thorough in its treatment of all aspects of biblical narrative. It consists of overviews of scholarship, innovative ways of reading, and discussions of methodology—the main focus of Part I (‘The Work of Biblical Narrative’, Fewell; ‘Biblical Narrative Analysis from the New Criticism to the New Narratology’, Moore; ‘Biblical Narrative and the Birth of Prose Literature’, Kawashima; ‘New Testament Narrative and Greco-Roman Literature’, Busch; ‘Biblical Historiography as Traditional History’, Person; Poetry and ‘Biblical Narrative’, Linafelt). Then in Part II texts that would seem to come under the biblical narrative genre umbrella are treated. For the Pentateuch there are six articles (‘Telling and Retelling the Bible’s First Story’, Gunn; ‘The Genesis of Identity in the Biblical World’, Fewell and Heard; ‘The Story of Exodus and its Literary Kinships’, Ngwa; ‘Blood, Death, and the Holy in the Leviticus Narrative’, Dibb; ‘Becoming Israel in the Wilderness of Numbers’, Leveen; ‘Remembering Narrative in Deuteronomy’, Britt). I was surprised to see an entry on narrative in Leviticus, not a text one would at first glance put into this category; however, its author maintains that, although part of a larger narrative that stretches across the Pentateuch, Leviticus is ‘thoroughly narrative in its own structure’ (p. 137). Whilst I still see this claim as an overstatement, the article helpfully points out the narrative context of the giving of ritual and legal texts, e.g. ritual instruction presented as the speech of God conveyed through Moses to the people. It also gives us a new angle from which to read this less accessible (in narrative terms) book.
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