The Style of the Opening of the Judean Novella

This article explores the literary style of the openings of three Judean novellas, Ruth, Esther, and Jonah, eliciting the different narrative techniques used to provide story background and shape audience expectation. First, using narratology, I identify a distinctive style of brisk, action-oriented narration which builds momentum and expectation for the story itself, a style I call »perfective-panoramic narration,« one which operates differently from the techniques normally associated with exposition in prose fiction. Next, I show how these novellas employ a technique which narratologists call etic openings, reliant on the textual and literary knowledge of its audience, thereby engendering a specific kind of fictionalization. Finally, I compare these stylistic features with contemporary practices in Demotic Egyptian novellas which corroborate these stylistic features as well as the use of certain fictionalizing techniques. The novellas, a coherent corpus of literature flourishing in the indigenous southeastern Mediterranean in the final centuries BCE, thus furnish important examples for the study of early forms of prose storytelling techniques, and for world literature and the history of prose fiction in general.