Scripturalized narrative is the practice of composing new stories from the language and patterns of earlier scriptures.
The study of intertextuality in biblical literature typically focuses on identifying connections between texts: quotations, allusions, and echoes that link one composition to another. These categories have proven invaluable for highlighting the many literary relationships that run through Jewish and Christian scriptures. A connected phenomenon operates at a different level from the isolated echo or quotation. In certain texts from this period, entire narrative episodes appear to have been composed using earlier scriptural passages as models, with scriptural language and details incorporated in the new story. This writing practice has come to be known as scripturalized narrative.1
From Scriptural Prayer to Narrative
The term "scripturalization" was first used in studies of Jewish prayer during the Second Temple period to describe the use of scriptural language and patterns in new prayers. Such reuse could recall a particular biblical story or simply give a prayer familiar scriptural language.2 Nehemiah 9:5-37, Judith 9:2-14, and 3 Maccabees 2:2-20 illustrate a practice that became common in later Jewish and Christian worship.
The concept was later applied to narratives, especially the Passion Narrative in Mark, where scriptural language appears throughout the account. One proposal describes its development as "tradition scripturalized", suggesting that reflection on scripture helped shape how events were remembered and retold.3 On this reading, historical memory and scriptural interpretation developed together, rather than scripture being added to an otherwise independent account.
Writing New Stories From Scripture
In narrative literature, scripturalization describes the use of a scriptural model or language to compose a new work, whether or not a particular interpretive purpose can be identified. This distinguishes it from two other practices within intertextuality.4
The first is inner-biblical exegesis, in which an author consciously interprets a scriptural source. Scripturalization need not involve that kind of deliberate interpretation; it can be a habit of composition. The second is typology, in which a person or event is deliberately modeled on an earlier scriptural example for a recognizable theological purpose. Scripturalization may have no identifiable purpose beyond supplying language and narrative patterns for a new composition.
The identification of scripturalized narrative thus requires "a confluence of similar language and narrative details" best explained by positing a literary relationship. The proposed scriptural source must be easily identifiable within its original literary context, and similar compositional techniques must be identifiable elsewhere, whether within the same work or in other texts from the period. These criteria help distinguish scripturalized narrative from the kinds of faint verbal resonances that might be classified as echoes within a standard intertextual framework.
Scriptural Language Across Literary Genres
The phenomenon of scripturalization is not confined to a single genre or literary tradition. It appears across a wide variety of Second Temple writings, including scripturalized laws in the Damascus Document and the Community Rule, scripturalized hymns in the Hodayot and the Psalms of Solomon, and scripturalized apocalyptic visions in 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra. In narratives, the technique has been identified in works originally composed in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, covering subjects both scriptural and historical. The Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum (Pseudo-Philo), the Genesis Apocryphon, 1 Maccabees, and Judith each feature self-contained episodes in which a scriptural source supplies language, narrative details, or structural form for a new story.5
Deuterocanonical literature provides some of the most developed examples of scripturalized composition. The Book of Judith draws extensively on literary traditions from Israel's past to describe national identity.6 The motifs that establish these connections include victory songs, female killers, echoes of earlier heroic figures, and the context of a threat to Jerusalem. The narrative of Judith's slaying of Holofernes draws extensively on the account of Jael's killing of Sisera in Judges 4, a connection evident in their shared language and in the structure of the episode, in which a woman lures an enemy military commander into a private space, waits until he is vulnerable, and kills him with a weapon at hand.
Judges 4:18-21
18Jael came out to welcome Sisera. She said to him, “Stop and rest, my lord. Stop and rest with me. Don’t be afraid.” So Sisera stopped to rest in her tent, and she put a blanket over him. 19He said to her, “Give me a little water to drink because I’m thirsty.” She opened a goatskin container of milk and gave him some milk to drink. Then she covered him up again. 20He said to her, “Stand watch at the entrance to the tent. If anyone comes along and asks you, ‘Is there a man here?’ say, ‘No.’” 21Then Jael wife of Heber took a tent peg in one hand and a hammer in the other. She crept up on him, drove the tent peg through his temple into the ground while he was asleep from exhaustion, and he died.
Judith 13:6-10
6She came to the bedpost which was at Holofernes’ head, and took down his sword from there. 7She came close to the bed, took hold of the hair of his head, and said, “Strengthen me, Lord God of Israel, today.” 8She struck twice on his neck with all her might and cut off his head, 9pushed his body down from the bed, and took down the canopy from the posts. After a little while she went out, and gave Holofernes’ head to her maid, 10and she put it in her bag of food. They both went out together to prayer, according to their custom. They passed through the camp, circled around that valley, and went up to the mountain of Bethulia, and came to its gates.
The same compositional technique appears in New Testament narrative. The account of Jesus feeding the multitude in Mark 6:35-44 follows the structure of 2 Kings 4:42-44, where Elisha feeds a hundred men with twenty loaves of bread. In both episodes, a crowd needs feeding, a servant objects that the available food is insufficient, the prophet commands the food to be distributed, and food is left over after everyone has eaten. The scriptural elements are unmarked and built directly into the narrative rather than being cited or attributed to a source.
2 Kings 4:42-44
42Now a man from Baal Shalisha brought some food for the prophet—20 loaves of bread made from the firstfruits of the barley harvest, as well as fresh ears of grain. Elisha said, “Set it before the people so they may eat.” 43But his attendant said, “How can I feed a hundred men with this?” He replied, “Set it before the people so they may eat, for this is what the Lord has said, ‘They will eat and have some left over.’” 44So he set it before them; they ate and had some left over, just as in the Lord’s message.
Mark 6:38-44
38He said to them, “How many loaves do you have? Go and see.” When they found out, they said, “Five—and two fish.” 39Then he directed them all to sit down in groups on the green grass. 40So they reclined in groups of hundreds and fifties. 41He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. He gave them to his disciples to serve the people, and he divided the two fish among them all. 42They all ate and were satisfied, 43and they picked up the broken pieces and fish that were left over, 12 baskets full. 44Now there were 5,000 men who ate the bread.
How Scripture Shapes Accounts of Events
Accounts of the Passion Narrative often distinguish between historical recollection and stories composed from passages understood as prophecy. Scripturalization offers a further possibility: reflection on scripture may have influenced how events were remembered and retold, so that historical recollection and literary composition cannot always be separated.7
This model has broader implications for how intertextuality functions in narrative from this period. The presence of scriptural language in a text does not automatically indicate that the text was invented from scripture, nor does it mean that the scriptural elements were added as a mere veneer over independent historical tradition. Scripturalization describes a compositional environment in which authors thought in the language of their scriptures and naturally composed new narratives using that language as raw material. The distinction matters for the study of intertextuality because it suggests that many of the verbal and thematic parallels identified between texts may reflect compositional habits rather than either deliberate exegetical arguments or coincidental similarities.8
Mark Goodacre, Prophecy Historicized or Tradition Scripturalized? Reflections on the Origins of the Passion Narrative, in The New Testament and the Church, LNTS 532 (London: T&T Clark, 2016), 37–51.
Geoffrey David Miller, “Methodological Reflections for Future Intertextual Studies,” in Intertextual Explorations in Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature, ed. Jeremy Corley and Geoffrey David Miller (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019), 16–17.
Article
Intertextuality and Scripturalized Narrative
How Authors Composed New Stories from Older Scriptures
Scripturalized narrative is the practice of composing new stories from the language and patterns of earlier scriptures.
The study of intertextuality in biblical literature typically focuses on identifying connections between texts: quotations, allusions, and echoes that link one composition to another. These categories have proven invaluable for highlighting the many literary relationships that run through Jewish and Christian scriptures. A connected phenomenon operates at a different level from the isolated echo or quotation. In certain texts from this period, entire narrative episodes appear to have been composed using earlier scriptural passages as models, with scriptural language and details incorporated in the new story. This writing practice has come to be known as scripturalized narrative.1
From Scriptural Prayer to Narrative
The term "scripturalization" was first used in studies of Jewish prayer during the Second Temple period to describe the use of scriptural language and patterns in new prayers. Such reuse could recall a particular biblical story or simply give a prayer familiar scriptural language.2 Nehemiah 9:5-37, Judith 9:2-14, and 3 Maccabees 2:2-20 illustrate a practice that became common in later Jewish and Christian worship.
The concept was later applied to narratives, especially the Passion Narrative in Mark, where scriptural language appears throughout the account. One proposal describes its development as "tradition scripturalized", suggesting that reflection on scripture helped shape how events were remembered and retold.3 On this reading, historical memory and scriptural interpretation developed together, rather than scripture being added to an otherwise independent account.
Writing New Stories From Scripture
In narrative literature, scripturalization describes the use of a scriptural model or language to compose a new work, whether or not a particular interpretive purpose can be identified. This distinguishes it from two other practices within intertextuality.4
The first is inner-biblical exegesis, in which an author consciously interprets a scriptural source. Scripturalization need not involve that kind of deliberate interpretation; it can be a habit of composition. The second is typology, in which a person or event is deliberately modeled on an earlier scriptural example for a recognizable theological purpose. Scripturalization may have no identifiable purpose beyond supplying language and narrative patterns for a new composition.
The identification of scripturalized narrative thus requires "a confluence of similar language and narrative details" best explained by positing a literary relationship. The proposed scriptural source must be easily identifiable within its original literary context, and similar compositional techniques must be identifiable elsewhere, whether within the same work or in other texts from the period. These criteria help distinguish scripturalized narrative from the kinds of faint verbal resonances that might be classified as echoes within a standard intertextual framework.
Scriptural Language Across Literary Genres
The phenomenon of scripturalization is not confined to a single genre or literary tradition. It appears across a wide variety of Second Temple writings, including scripturalized laws in the Damascus Document and the Community Rule, scripturalized hymns in the Hodayot and the Psalms of Solomon, and scripturalized apocalyptic visions in 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra. In narratives, the technique has been identified in works originally composed in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, covering subjects both scriptural and historical. The Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum (Pseudo-Philo), the Genesis Apocryphon, 1 Maccabees, and Judith each feature self-contained episodes in which a scriptural source supplies language, narrative details, or structural form for a new story.5
Deuterocanonical literature provides some of the most developed examples of scripturalized composition. The Book of Judith draws extensively on literary traditions from Israel's past to describe national identity.6 The motifs that establish these connections include victory songs, female killers, echoes of earlier heroic figures, and the context of a threat to Jerusalem. The narrative of Judith's slaying of Holofernes draws extensively on the account of Jael's killing of Sisera in Judges 4, a connection evident in their shared language and in the structure of the episode, in which a woman lures an enemy military commander into a private space, waits until he is vulnerable, and kills him with a weapon at hand.
The same compositional technique appears in New Testament narrative. The account of Jesus feeding the multitude in Mark 6:35-44 follows the structure of 2 Kings 4:42-44, where Elisha feeds a hundred men with twenty loaves of bread. In both episodes, a crowd needs feeding, a servant objects that the available food is insufficient, the prophet commands the food to be distributed, and food is left over after everyone has eaten. The scriptural elements are unmarked and built directly into the narrative rather than being cited or attributed to a source.
How Scripture Shapes Accounts of Events
Accounts of the Passion Narrative often distinguish between historical recollection and stories composed from passages understood as prophecy. Scripturalization offers a further possibility: reflection on scripture may have influenced how events were remembered and retold, so that historical recollection and literary composition cannot always be separated.7
This model has broader implications for how intertextuality functions in narrative from this period. The presence of scriptural language in a text does not automatically indicate that the text was invented from scripture, nor does it mean that the scriptural elements were added as a mere veneer over independent historical tradition. Scripturalization describes a compositional environment in which authors thought in the language of their scriptures and naturally composed new narratives using that language as raw material. The distinction matters for the study of intertextuality because it suggests that many of the verbal and thematic parallels identified between texts may reflect compositional habits rather than either deliberate exegetical arguments or coincidental similarities.8
Notes