Prologue

Summary

This chapter introduces the ten complaint episodes in the books of Exodus and Numbers as the primary focus of the book and sets the context and method for reading them. The history of modern biblical scholarship is a history of the pursuit of sources. This book focuses instead on genre as a set of historically grounded aesthetic norms. It proposes that we can best understand the literary history of the wilderness narrative by tracking how these norms change over time as Israel’s political and social circumstances change and its scribes navigate those changes by revising existing texts in order to create new possibilities for meaning. Pursuing the kind of genre history Hermann Gunkel advocated without tying it to existing approaches can yield new readings of these episodes and new insights into the literary history of the Pentateuch (Torah), whether documentary or supplementary. Historical criticism is presented as an exegetical, not an antiquarian, endeavor, one that requires the kind of literarily sensitive close reading typical of so-called synchronic studies of the final form. The genres used will help us situate this literature historically, as will the creative ways in which scribes used them.