2.6 part 2
2.6:chosen passage: Hosea 11:1-11 – “When Israel was a child . . .”
Some literary works, including books of the Bible, were written by an author who deliberately chose to write them from the perspective of an implied author. For example, Søren Kierkegaard’s work Sickness Unto Death is written by Søren Kierkegaard but Kierkegaard deliberately wrote it from the perspective of someone different from himself, as though he were writing from an imagined character’s perspective. In the book of Revelation, it is written from the perspective of someone experiencing visions of the heavenly realms, along with symbols of dragons, stars, lampstands, and beasts which emerge out of the sea. This is a particular genre called ‘apocalyptic’ literature and it is a known practice that this genre might be attributed to an author who never wrote it for various reasons. For example, someone might attribute a work to a disciple of Jesus or to Moses in order to give the book credibility among a particular community. The point is that even though most books are written by an author and the style of the writing might assume this, there can be a difference between the actual author of a written work and the author implied within the text.
- Using the space below, jot down 5-10 statements about your Bible passage which help us better understand the perspective and the vantage-point from which the author wrote this text.
- What do you notice? What can you learn about the author from just the words in the book of the Bible your passage is found in?
- Remember to use specific phrases, terms, evidence from the words of your passage to make your point.
- Example: Ecclesiastes
- We read at the opening of the book of Ecclesiastes: “The words of the Teacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem”. We are told the author is a teacher (Hebrew: Koholet), that he is a son of king David. So the implied author of our passage is a son. He is royal, someone who could potentially take (or already has taken up) the throne of his father. This rule also pertains to the region of Jerusalem. We are fortunate that we have an explicit mention of authorship of this book, but we do not read a specific name of who this son of David is. We can assume, and many scholars believe, the teacher is king Solomon, the king who took his father’s throne. But note that all we have is the text itself. It is possible to write a book as though you were this person (or from the vantage-point of a person you imagine yourself to be). In some cases, you have a book which is said to be written by a particular author but it is, in fact, written by someone else. That is the difference between an ‘implied author’ of a text and the ‘actual, historical author’ of a text. Most of the time, it turns out that they are the same person. But because we are looking at the literary features of the text, we want to see what we can guess about the author from just the words found in the book itself and not from any kind of historical analysis or research. Remember, the ‘Literary World’ is about the “world withinthe text.”
