Biblical rhetoric as illustrated by Judah’s speech in Genesis 44:18-34
Although persuasive speech takes an important place in the biblical corpus, the method for analyzing persuasive texts remains underdeveloped. What distinguishes this literary genre is the way it acts upon the pragmatic speech situation: while narration transfers the audience to a far-away reality, a...
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| Format: | Journal article |
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SAGE Publications
2016
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| Summary: | Although persuasive speech takes an important place in the biblical corpus, the method for analyzing persuasive texts remains underdeveloped. What distinguishes this literary genre is the way it acts upon the pragmatic speech situation: while narration transfers the audience to a far-away reality, and poetry creates its own world, rhetoric interacts directly with the situation at hand. Important tools of analysis are provided by ancient Greco-Roman theories of rhetoric in which this distinctive characteristic is central. Yet biblical rhetoric is rather different from its classical counterpart. In this article Judah's speech in Gen. 44.18–34 is first analysed according to the rules of classical rhetoric. The approach throws light on the inner working of the text, but at the same time it indicates a few features for which the classical theory is unable to account. The most important of these are explored and compared to similar features in other persuasive texts in the Bible. |
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