Putting Characters Back in their Place

This article takes up Erich Auerbach's claim that, while biblical narrative, unlike ancient Greek heroic epic, refrains from directly addressing the emotions of its characters, it is "fraught with background" and gestures at them repeatedly. The reader, in other words, is meant to fill in the gaps. Robert Alter, Meir Sternberg and others have largely follwed that suggestion in their work on biblical narrative. I argue that this thread of narrative theory corresponds to a Western, dualistic theory of knowledge that proceeds with a dichotomy between the representation of the material world and its underlying spiritual realities. Instead I propose that the apparent treatment of biblical characters as flat has to do with a different notion of personhood present in ancient Israel, one in which the contents of the person are not located in their interior, with their body being exterior, but rather are produced as a series of effects through social relations, material commitments, events, and objects that extend beyond the self and exist between selves. I explore this theme through several focal points in the Joseph narratives - Joseph's dream, the brothers' "guilt," Joseph's weeping, and Judah's petition - with special attention to issues of emotion and translation as they pertain to Hebrew terms for "love" (ʾhb), "hate" (śnʾ ), "jealousy" (qn'), "memory" (zkr), "guilt" ('sm̆ ), and "sight" (rʾh).