Norman W. Jones

This is a very helpful and well informed book which outlines a series of topics relating to Biblical interpretation and analysis. Informed by cutting edge scholarship as well as demonstrating an assured and sensitive response to previous schools of exegesis, Jones proceeds in an engaging and clear way through numerous matters of interest. Taking as a starting point the importance of narrative as a means to understand the spirituality of the Bible as well as the historical importance of the text, he begins with the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel. This he takes as symptomatic of the Bible as a whole and of its reception history. The idea of the relationship with God and the text of the Bible as a struggle illuminates a lot of this book.

Major chapters focus on metaphors central to presenting how the Bible functions as a text - the metaphor of friends, family, lovers, crime and punshment as well as heroes and transformations. These are illustrated with clarity in relation to concrete examples of each and they are laid revealingly alongside each other to expose the interconnectedness of many of the topics and symbols. This is not to say that Jones imposes a unity on the material - one of the issues he consistently returns to is the tension between the literary impulse to discover pattern and order on the one hand and the insights of the Higher Criticism to identify the text as a collage of narratives, genres, voices and intentions on the other. To this extent, Jones' approach is broadly deconstructive, even opening up in the final chapters (with reference to Charles Taylor's work) the possibility of deconstructing the opposition of the secular and the religious to reveal how each contains traces of the other within itself.

The book includes an interesting chapter on the influence that the Bible (especially in its King James incarnation) has had on literary style at the level of vocabulary, syntax, imagery and the poetic line. At times, Jones even suggests that our very notion of the literary and of literary language may be indebted to the influence of the Bible.

Along the way, this book refers to a number of key literary texts which are shaped by Biblical styles and modes of thinking. These include obvious ones such as Chaucer and "Paradise Lost" but also others such as the work of Faulkner, Patrick White, Hawthorne, Whitman and Toni Morrison. As with his anaysis of the Biblical narratives, it would have been better if these were developed at more length, sometimes the discussions are truncated. However, it is an introductory book and this flaw (if it be such) is compensated for by the inclusion of bibliographies and suggested further reading.

There is a tendency at times to be a little too "up-to-date" for my taste - the fairly insistent use of Harry Potter and Dracula as models for his arguments is slightly frustrating at times. I would have preferred more on Dostoevsky or DIckens, but that is a matter of taste rather then anything else. As a book to put alongiside others on a similar topic such as Josipovici's "The Book of God" and Northrop Frye's "The Great Code", this stands up well and provides useful insight. All in all, this is an illuminating and helpful book to which I shall probably find myself returning with pleasure and interest.… (altro)