Is There a Text in This Tradition? Readers' Response and the Taming of Samuel's God

Abstract

According to Medvedev and Bakhtin, genre involves two components: a reduction of life to a thematic framework, and an orientation toward a defined performance situation. However, a cultural artifact is subject to a blind process of replication and descent that has little to do with its designer's intention. What survives is that which happens to thrive in a given environment, whether it was designed for that environment or not. A text's ‘genre’ might change radically even when not a word of the text has been altered or omitted. In this case, genre involves only one component, the community's response to the text, as argued by Stanley Fish and others. So it is with the biblical scrolls of Samuel. That which appears, from all available evidence, to have begun as a relatively secular form of traditional storytelling, has been preserved and replicated well beyond any reasonable life-expectancy because it was reinterpreted as divinely authored authoritative religious literature offering a revelatory glimpse at the methods by which the God of the universe interacts with creation.