Biblical Narratives in Early Jewish Imagination

During the Second Temple period, earlier Jewish writings, including those texts that came to constitute the Hebrew Bible, were still in the process of becoming authoritative and eventually canonical. This process stimulated the production of a body of literature that engaged with those writings. The Hebrew Bible’s laconic style left many ambiguities and opportunities for gap filling, one of the tasks of interpretation. Narratives were composed that expanded on the would-be biblical texts and often addressed questions that arose from the biblical text’s terse style. For example, Genesis 11–12, which first introduces Abraham at the age of seventy-five, does not tell us why God commanded him, of all people, to leave Ur of the Chaldeans or much else about his life until that calling. The biblical text is also unclear as to why God selected Israel, rather than any other nation of the world, to receive the Ten Commandments. Rabbinic stories and their Second Temple precursors took biblical personae as their starting points and created fanciful backstories, sometimes out of whole cloth and sometimes based on the quirks and subtleties of the biblical text. A common feature of these interpretive stories is their attempt to identify unnamed or inconsequential figures in the biblical text and add details to their narratives.

The emergence of this parabiblical (literally, “beyond” or “adjacent” to the Bible) literature shows that the narrative underlying the Hebrew Bible had by this point become the foundational story of the Jewish people and was central to its self-understanding and identity. Some of this retelling and commentary is moralizing and edifying, but some seems to serve little purpose beyond entertainment. In writing this literature, Jews were frequently responding to the influence of Hellenistic culture and its hermeneutics. Some of the earliest extant examples of what may be called novellas were composed by Jewish writers in the late Second Temple period. These stories have biblical protagonists but speak to the contemporaneous concerns of the communities in which they were written. One such example is the novella Joseph and Aseneth, which provides a backstory to Joseph’s marriage to a highborn Egyptian woman that takes up themes of cultural assimilation, the boundaries between Jew and Other, and conversion. Other novellas of this period include stories about Susannah, Sarah (in the book of Tobit), and Judith.