"The type-scene is not merely a way of formally recognizing a particular kind of narrative moment; it is also a means of attaching that moment to a larger pattern of historical and theological meaning." (Robert Alter - The Art of Biblical Narrative 2011, p.72)
[MS: Rabbi Sacks credits for Robert Alter for type scenes and translations, see MS Sefaria Sheet on Rabbi Sacks.]
Chapter 1: A Literary Approach to the Bible
"What role does literary art play in the shaping of biblical narrative? A crucial one ...
finely modulated from moment to moment;
determining in most cases the minute choice of words and reported details;
the pace of narration;
the small movements of dialogue;
and a whole network of ramified interconnections in the text. ...
It would be well to follow the sustained operation of narrative art in a biblical text." (p. 1. Formatting added)
[MS: Alter introduces this "sustained operation of narrative art" in the story of Tamar and Judah, Genesis 38 and the story of Joseph's slavery in Potiphar's household, pp.1-13; Alter also contrasts how a narrative continuum is created by this literary approach verses how Midrash both uses and diverges from the text itself. p.11]
Chapter 3 Biblical Type-Scenes and the Uses of Conventions (from Art of Biblical Narrative 2011 Revised and Updated, Robert Alter)
(Copyrighted Material) [MS: excerpts, emphasis and formatting added]
[MS: What is a type-scene? Alter starts with a modern example. Think about John Wayne or Hollywood cowboy Western movies and the "Shoot Out" scene - who draws the fastest or what is a "fair" fight. These are type-scenes. (See Note one at page 57.) Alter identifies six kinds of type-scenes, including the betrothal type-scene. p. 60.]
(pp. 56-58) Let us suppose that some centuries hence only a dozen films survive from the whole corpus of Hollywood westerns. As students of twentieth-century cinema screening the films on an ingeniously reconstructed archaic projector, we notice a recurrent peculiarity: in eleven of the films, ... no matter what the situation in which his adversaries confront him, he is always able to pull his gun out of its holster and fire before they, with their weapons poised, can pull the trigger. ...
In the twelfth film, the sheriff has a withered arm and, instead of a six-shooter, he uses a rifle that he carries slung over his back. ...
The scholars will then divide between a majority that posits an original source-western (designated Q) ... and a more speculative minority that proposes an old California Indian myth concerning a sky-god with arms of lightning .... The twelfth film, in the view of both schools, must be ascribed to a different cinematic tradition.
pp. 56-57 The central point, ... is the presence of convention. We contemporary viewers of westerns back in the era when the films were made immediately recognize the convention without having to name it as such. Much of our pleasure in watching westerns derives from our awareness that the hero, however sinister the dangers looming over him, leads a charmed life, that he will always in the end prove himself to be more of a man than the bad guys who stalk him, and the familiar token of his indomitable manhood is his invariable, ... uncanny, quickness on the draw. ...
For us, the recurrence of the hyperreflexive sheriff is not an enigma to be explained but, on the contrary, a necessary condition for telling a western story in the film medium as it should be told. With our easy knowledge of the convention, moreover, we naturally see a point in the twelfth, exceptional film that would be invisible to the historical scholars. For in this case, we recognize that the convention of the quick-drawing hero is present through its deliberate suppression. Here is a sheriff who seems to lack the expected equipment for his role, but we note the daring assertion of manly will against almost impossible odds in the hero’s learning to make do with what he has, training his left arm to whip his rifle into firing position with a swiftness that makes it a match for the quickest draw in the West.
[MS: Western Hollywood Cowboy movies and how viewers follow the good guys is a useful way to understand type scenes. Per Alter, we watch a type-scene for John Wayne in the classic 1959 Howard Hawks Western, Rio Bravo, who defends a Sheriff with a broken arm, up against impossible odds. Footnote 1, p.57. I'd add The Rifleman, 1958, another classic Western where viewers watch a shoot-out by the heroic Sheriff who spins a rifle to shoot faster than the bad guys can draw a pistol. Alter identifies 6 kinds of type scenes, p.60.]
p. 57-58 Some of the analogous conventions through which biblical narrators variously worked out their tacit contract with their contemporary audiences are perhaps, after three millennia, no longer recoverable. Let me be perfectly candid about the inherent difficulty of our project. The key problem is not only the centuries elapsed since this body of literature was created but the small corpus of works that has survived. ... Nevertheless, I think that we may be able to recover some essential elements of ancient convention, and thus to understand biblical narrative more precisely, if the questions we ask of it assume a fairly high degree of literary purposefulness.
The most crucial case in point is the perplexing fact that in biblical narrative more or less the same story often seems to be told two or three or more times about different characters, or sometimes even about the same character in different sets of circumstances. Three times a patriarch is driven by famine to a southern region where he pretends that his wife is his sister, narrowly avoids a violation of the conjugal bond by the local ruler, and is sent away with gifts (Gen. 12:10–20; Gen. 20; Gen. 26:1–12). Twice Hagar flees into the wilderness from Sarah’s hostility and discovers a miraculous well (Gen. 16; Gen. 21:9–21), and that story itself seems only a special variation of the recurrent story of bitter rivalry between a barren, favored wife and a fertile co-wife or concubine. That situation, in turn, suggests another oft-told tale in the Bible, of a woman long barren who is vouchsafed a divine promise of progeny, whether by God himself or through a divine messenger or oracle, and who then gives birth to a hero. ...
p.58 ...the most common strategy among scholars is to attribute ostensible duplication in the narratives to a duplication of sources or to a tapping of different traditions by one source, which amounts to a kind of recurrent stammer in the process of transmission, whether written or oral convention. ...
p.59 The variations in the parallel episodes are not at all random, as a scrambling by oral transmission would imply, and the repetitions themselves are no more “duplications” of a single ur-story than our eleven films about a fast-shooting sheriff were duplications of a single film.
p.60 ... I should like to propose that there is a series of recurrent narrative episodes attached to the careers of biblical heroes that are analogous to Homeric type-scenes in that they are dependent on the manipulation of a fixed constellation of predetermined motifs. Since biblical narrative characteristically catches its protagonists only at the critical and revealing points in their lives, the biblical type-scene occurs not in the rituals of daily existence but at the crucial junctures in the lives of the heroes, from conception and birth to betrothal to deathbed. Not every type-scene will occur for every major hero, though often the absence of a particular type-scene may itself be significant.
p. 60 Some of the most commonly repeated biblical type-scenes I have been able to identify are the following:
1-the annunciation ... of the birth of the hero to his barren mother;
2-the encounter with the future betrothed at a well;
3-the epiphany in the field;
4-the initiatory trial;
5-danger in the desert and the discovery of a well or other source of sustenance;
6-the testament of the dying hero. [MS: numbering added]
p. 61 [T]he recognition of pattern as literary convention leads to a different understanding of how the patterns actually work. ...
As I shall try to illustrate, what is finally more significant is the inventive freshness with which formulas are recast and redeployed in each new instance.
[MS: pp. 68-69 Alter gives three examples of betrothal type-scenes:
Genesis 24:10-61, Abraham's servant meets Rebekah at a well;
Genesis 29:1-20 - Jacob and Rachel;
Exodus 2:150-4 - Moses and Zipporah (only four verses)
p.69 What I am suggesting is that the contemporary audiences of these tales, being perfectly familiar with the convention, took particular pleasure in seeing how in each instance the convention could be, through the narrator’s art, both faithfully followed and renewed for the specific needs of the hero under consideration. In some cases, moreover, the biblical authors, counting on their audience’s familiarity with the features and function of the type-scene, could merely allude to the type-scene or present a transfigured version of it.
p. 70-74
MS: Alter discusses several variations:
1.The one biblical narrative that is in a sense entirely devoted to the circumstances leading to a betrothal is the Book of Ruth (type-scenes with allusions)
2. Saul in 1 Samuel 9:11-12 an "aborted" type scene;
3. David (a type-scene is "suppressed" or omitted on purpose); and 4. Sampson ( Judges 14) on-purpose "omitted" type-scene.]
p. 71 In all this, of course, we must keep in mind that what we are witnessing is not merely the technical manipulation of a literary convention for the sheer pleasure of play with the convention .... The type-scene is not merely a way of formally recognizing a particular kind of narrative moment; it is also a means of attaching that moment to a larger pattern of historical and theological meaning.
p. 77 ...The most plausible hypothesis, then, is that these intriguing instances of recurrent sequences of narrative motif reflect a literary convention that, like other narrative conventions, enabled the teller of the tale to orient his listeners, to give them intricate clues as to where the tale was going, how it differed delightfully or ingeniously or profoundly from other similar tales.
p. 77 ... The apprehension about seeing the Bible in literary terms is that by so doing we unreasonably modernize it, wrench it out of its original context and purposes. This is a slippery slope down which any modern literary analyst could easily slide. ... approaches that insist that the ancient materials conform to the logical assumptions of sequence and organization of a later age, somehow supposed to be timeless and universal. ...
Biblical narrative, for all its laconic nature, evinces an extraordinary degree of artistic sophistication, ... playing with the permutations of a literary code largely unfamiliar to us ....
pp 77-78. One can grasp with greater clarity what it is that convention and its modifications can do to define narrative situation, character, theme,and moral vision. As for reading of the Bible itself, we may come not only to appreciate these narratives better but, more important, to understand what they intend to say.