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"Encountering an ancient text not only as a historical source but also as a literary artifact entails an important paradigm shift, which in recent years has taken place in classical and Oriental philology. Biblical scholars, Egyptologists, and classical philologists have been pioneers in supplementing traditional historical-critical exegesis with more-literary approaches. This has led to a wealth of new insights. While the methodological consequences of this shift have been discussed within each discipline, until recently there has not been an attempt to discuss its validity and methodology on an interdisciplinary level. In 2006, the Faculty of Bible and Biblical Interpretation at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien, Heidelberg, and the Faculty of Theology at the University of Heidelberg invited scholars from the U.S., Canada, the Netherlands, Israel, and Germany to examine these issues. Under the title "Literary Fiction and the Construction of Identity in Ancient Literatures: Options and Limits of Modern Literary Approaches in the Exegesis of Ancient Texts," experts in Egyptology, classical philology, ancient Near Eastern studies, biblical studies, Jewish studies, literary studies, and comparative religion came together to present current research and debate open questions."--Publisher's description Thinking of ancient texts as literature. Memory, narration, identity: Exodus as a political myth / Jan Assmann -- Narrative poetics and Hebrew narrative: a survey / Joachim vette -- Is there a universal genre of "drama"? conjectures on the basis of "dramatic" texts in Old Testament prophecy, Attic tragedy, and Egyptian cult plays / Helmut Utzschneider -- Narratology and the Classics: the proof of the pudding -- / Irene J.F. de Jong -- The identity of authors and readers. Ancient writers, modern readers, and King Ashurnasirpal's political problems: an exploration of the possibility of reading ancient texts / Barbara N. Porter -- The Achilles heel of reader-response criticism and the concept of reading hermeneutics of caution / Christof Hardmeier -- Tell me who I am: reading the alphabet of Ben Sira / Dagmar Boerner-Klein -- The powers of a lost subject: reinventing a poet's identity in Catullus's Carmen / Melanie Moeller -- Fiction and fact. Forms of talk in Hebrew Biblical narrative: negotiations, interaction, and sociocultural context / Frank H. Polak -- Of mice and men and blood: the laws of ritual purity in the Hebrew Bible / Hanna Liss -- Fiction and imagination in early Christian literature: the acts of the Apostles as a test case / Ute E. Eisen -- Fictions and formulations: the Talmud and the construction of Jewish identity / David Kraemer -- Are vocation texts fictional? on Hesiod's Helicon experience / Geritt Kloss -- Rereading Biblical poetry from Aristotle to Bakhtin: the comedic and the carnivalesque in a Biblical tale / Nehama Aschkenasy -- Where is Isaiah in Isaiah? / Francis Landy -- Job 28 and the climax in chapters 29-31: crisis and identity / Jan Fokkelman -- Modeling the future by reconstructing the past. Samuel's "farewell speech": theme and variation in Samuel 12, Josephus, and pseudo-Philo / Joachim Vette -- The exile: Biblical ideology and its postmodern ideological interpretation / Adele Berlin.
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