Reading the Text With its Ancient Audience: The Amnon and Tamar Narrative as a Test Case

This thesis seeks to demonstrate that the methods of narrative criticism can be employed in a modified way to address the problems with the intentional fallacy that are inherent in narrative criticism, and the tendency of narrative criticism to ignore historical-critical questions about the text. This modification will employ a new method to analyze the Amnon and Tamar narrative as follows: first use the historical-critical method to reconstruct JEDtrH, then use reception criticism to determine the ways in which the earliest audience of JEDtrH could have understood the text, then use narrative criticism to present one way in which one member of its earliest audience could have understood one pericope within the text. This analysis is preceded by a chapter explaining the interpretive styles associated with narrative criticism.