A Poetics of Subservience: Narrative Voicing in the Priestly History of the Pentateuch

Aslan Cohen Mizrahi, the 2024-25 Perilman Postdoctoral Fellow, gives a lecture "A Poetics of Subservience: Narrative Voicing in the Priestly History of the Pentateuch."

A work of narrative prose now embedded in the Pentateuch, the Priestly History (P) is a testament to the richness of the ancient Israelite literary and political imaginations. Narrative literature affords writers the freedom to create alternate realities. And the way in which P's authors harnessed those powers reflects a radical commitment to the absolutist notion of sovereignty that shaped the political landscape of the ancient Near East. In this talk, I will show that P's radical commitment to sovereignty is not only implicit in what the story tells but also in how the story is told. P's storyline presents the cosmic past and the origins of the Israelite nationhood as the products of a singular, omnipotent will-that of a divine sovereign known as Yahweh. On top of that, P develops a "poetics of subservience" where the narrator's discourse is made to sound like a dim echo of Yahweh's history-making speech. While the latter conceit is grounded in the ancient Near Eastern motif of the efficacy of royal speech, P's unique contribution to storytelling lies in the elevation of this motif into a governing principle of narrative poetics. This account of P's approach to storytelling raises critical questions critical questions regarding contemporary conceptualizations of narratorial biblical omniscience, and it calls for a more sophisticated theoretical understanding of how voicing relates to authority.

Aslan Cohen Mizrahi is Perilman Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies at Duke University. Born and raised in Mexico City, Aslan earned a BA in Economics from ITAM and a BA in Philosophy from UNAM. In 2014, Aslan moved to Chicago to pursue an MA in Religious Studies at the University of Chicago, where he later received a PhD in Hebrew Bible (2024). His interests range from the narrative voicing in the Pentateuchal Priestly History to the uses of biblical texts in the wake of the Holocaust. He lives in Durham with his wife and two children.