Satterthwaite's No King In Israel: Narrative Criticism

The New Literary Criticism is a literary method of analysis that is centered on the text itself. In Robert Alter’s article entitled “Literature”, explains that the framers of rabbinic Midrash did not concentrate on recurring motifs as much as the modern world and it was not until Genesis Rabbah that the framers began to recognize connections linked between different passages. Unlike the old forms of literary criticism, New Literary Criticism seeks to understand the structure and function of a biblical text without any external sources, but only through the text’ s accepted final form. This Criticism is most similar to narrative criticism in that there is an analysis of the text without much attention towards the history. However, New Literary Criticism explicitly avoids any external sources to find meaning within the text while Narrative Criticism takes into the stylistic account of the redactors in the text, which would not be applied within New Literary Criticism.

In Philip Satterthwaite’s “No King in Israel: Narrative Criticism and Judges 17-21”, he explains that it is an approach to the Old Testament narrative that attempts to find unities and literary artistry in order to convey a message about the continuity of narratives. Through this, Narrative Criticism is able to derive the meaning created by the text that describes our human experiences. This Criticism is most similar to Canonical Criticism because of their connections with how meaning is passed down generations in order to translate meaning along with the assumptions made for a biblical text. However, Narrative criticism is focused on a specific story within a canon while Canonical Criticism looks at the entire canon as a whole in their translation and reception by believing