"Not By My Name Was I Known": Nonspecific Characters in Hebrew Narrative

Abstract

Unnamed characters are ubiquitous in Hebrew narratives, whether they are bit-players or functionaries who help to advance the plot, key figures in a particular narrative episode, or whether they lie somewhere in between. The variety of roles they play and the differences in their characterization attest to the diversity of characters present in this category; not all anonymous characters can be understood in the same way. This study thus proposes a new category for describing and analyzing characters in Hebrew narrative, that of “nonspecificity,” defined as the phenomenon in which a narrator does not include details that would clearly correlate a signifier in a piece of discourse to a particular, singular, or narrowly defined referent in the storyworld that the reader could theoretically know or identify. Nonspecificity focuses attention not just on the character’s lack of name but rather on the information that is provided in the narrative, based upon the presumption that the biblical narrator tells the reader what the reader needs to know in order to understand the story. Thus, this study asks why and to what end a narrator does not name a character in a narrative, especially given the Hebrew Bible’s general penchant for naming names and its juxtaposition of specific characters and texts with those that are nonspecific. In particular, this study asks about the narrative function of such characters: that is, how they serve the stories in which they appear and how those stories, in turn, factor into broader narrative arcs.Working at the intersection of studies on Hebrew narrative poetics (Alter, Bar-Efrat, Berlin, and Sternberg) and studies on anonymous and minor characters (or the “supporting cast”) in the Hebrew Bible (especially Reinhartz and Hens-Piazza), this dissertation seeks to show how nonspecificity can be understood as another feature in the poetics of Hebrew narrative. The discussion presented here establishes a theory of character and an understanding of nonspecificity as a category before exploring the variety of ways in which such characters are presented by the narrator in the biblical text. It then turns to examine a representative sample of narratives that exemplify some of the different functions of nonspecific characters, culminating in an analysis of 1 Kgs 13, a passage which is nearly unique in the Hebrew Bible in its level of nonspecificity. In the end, this study demonstrates that, while there is no single function for nonspecificity or nonspecific characters in Hebrew narrative, attention to this category reveals several ways in which nonspecificity impacts the telling of stories, highlights certain features of a character or themes in the narrative, leads toward figurative and symbolic readings, and invites interpretive opportunities that would not necessarily be so obvious if the characters were named.