Un libro e i suoi lettori: rileggere e riscrivere oggi il racconto biblico

A book and its readers: reading and re-writing today the biblical stories. This research deals with the narratives which compose the book of the Jewish and Christian Bible, considered from a literary perspective, and with the way they have been read in contemporary western culture. More specifically, it points to two traditional ways of reading which are in fact also ways of re-writing – more or less faithfully – the biblical stories: the rabbinic midrash on one side and the apocryphal literature on the other. Moving from an historical survey on the Bible as a literary work, this study focuses on contemporary exegetical methods which combine classical historical-critical or philological approaches with an innovative use of literary tools: the most significant one is the so-called analyse narrative, or narrative exegesis. Although it has been quite widespread in the English-speaking and French-speaking world since the eighties, only recently narrative exegesis has begun to be employed by some scholars in Italy. This delay is mostly due to the strong influence of the Catholic tradition in the Italian cultural world and therefore to the different approach to the Bible developed in the European and North-american Reformed area. But if academic scholars are still cautious in considering the Bible as a literary work, writers not so. The centuries-old tradition of retelling the biblical stories has always been alive, whether in the “midrashic” or in the “apocryphal” way. So this study analyzes some examples of “exegetical narrations” in the western contemporary literature: by means of creating new narratives, they implicitly offer new interpretations of the Bible, while showing their own relationship to that book. Taking the biblical Book of Job as a case-study, the last part of this work focuses on some re-writings of that specific biblical narrative in literature, poetry, graphic novel and cinema. Job as a character and his fictional story have enjoyed an unceasing fame along the centuries. But more often than not, that fame has been linked to a stereotypical reading of Job as “the perfectly patient”, the man who accepts both good and evil from God's hands without giving in. Taking into account some “exegetical narrations” may help shaking a little that stereotypical reading and contribute to release the biblical narrative itself. Finally, this research's conclusion is that the tools of literary criticism had proved themselves to be definitely useful for a renewal in biblical exegesis; at the same time, however, it's to be hoped that some of the peculiar achievements of a millennial tradition in biblical studies would be looked at with increasing interest by literary criticism. This relationship between literary criticism and biblical studies appears to be an intriguing field to further exploration, most of all for comparative literature.