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JEROME T. WALSH, Style and Structure in Biblical Hebrew Narrative (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press/Michael Glazier, 2001). Pp. xiv + 205. Paper $19.95.
Jerome Walsh, who pays careful attention to every detail of the various Hebrew texts that he treats, seeks to discover consistent patterns in the style and structure in biblical Hebrew narrative in order to shed light on the "organizing elements and organized units" of the biblical text (p. 10). W claims that "repetition is the most common formal device for organizing Hebrew prose" (pp. 7, 145-53), and he maintains that various styles and structures can offer insight into how one can "mark the boundaries" between the various units and subunits of the Hebrew narrative.
In the first half of the book, W. describes various uses of symmetry and asymmetry, claiming that these rhetorical devices provide the key to understanding the organizational patterns of Scripture. In the second half, he seeks to establish how "structures of disjunction" and "structures of conjunction" can also organize literary units. Since much of biblical scholarship in the past two hundred years has concentrated on the original atomized units of tradition history, we should applaud W. for his efforts to explain how smaller units of tradition became part of the whole biblical witness.
Walsh produces his strongest arguments when he discusses...