“What is it like, the biblical writers seek to know through their art, to be a human being with a divided consciousness—intermittently loving your brother but hating him even more; resentful or perhaps contemptuous of your father but also capable of the deepest filial regard; stumbling between disastrous ignorance and imperfect knowledge; fiercely asserting your own independence but caught in a tissue of events divinely contrived; outwardly a definite character and inwardly an unstable vortex of greed, ambition, jealousy, lust, piety, courage, compassion, and much more?” GodBibleRobert AlterBiblical Narrative Book:The Art of Biblical Narrative Source: The Art of Biblical Narrative
“Finally, it is the inescapable tension between human freedom and divine historical plan that is brought forth so luminously through the pervasive repetitions of the Bible’s narrative art.” GodBibleRobert AlterBiblical Narrative Book:The Art of Biblical Narrative Source: The Art of Biblical Narrative
“The monotheistic revolution of biblical Israel was a continuing and disquieting one. It left little margin for neat and confident views about God, the created world, history, and man as political animal or moral agent, for it repeatedly had to make sense of the intersection of incompatibles—the relative and the absolute, human imperfection and divine perfection, the brawling chaos of historical experience and God’s promise to fulfill a design in history. The biblical outlook is informed, I think, by a sense of stubborn contradiction, of a profound and ineradicable untidiness in the nature of things, and it is toward the compression of such a sense of moral and historical reality that the composite artistry of the Bible is directed.” GodBibleRobert AlterBiblical Narrative Book:The Art of Biblical Narrative Source: The Art of Biblical Narrative