Homeric and Ancient Near Eastern Intertextuality in 1 Samuel 17 (Critical Essay‪)‬

Julia Kristeva, the philosopher and literary critic who advanced the concept of intertextuality and coined the term, once opined that "any text is the absorption and transformation of another." (1) Hyperbolic though it may be, the statement is fundamentally true: even the compositions that impart a predominantly novel message do not emerge in a vacuum; they draw upon existing conceptual and artistic frameworks, if only to transcend them in favor of fresh paradigms. In this sense, any text is a part of a cultural continuum that extends to the very beginnings of humankind. It is, however, anything but easy to trace that continuum, and not just because most of the links are usually missing. An even greater impediment is the uncertainty that inevitably surrounds the nature of the relationship between two texts that display what look like parallels. No matter how convincing, these do not necessarily attest to a genetic connection by way of conscious or unconscious mimesis, as the possibility of both compositions drawing from the same diffuse pool of motifs, tropes, concepts, and thought patterns should also be seriously considered, and even accidental convergence cannot be discounted. Further complicating the picture, parallels often point in several directions, sometimes toward texts composed in different languages and belonging to different cultures. Since the relative dating of ancient texts--and accordingly the mimetic vector--may likewise be indeterminate, meaningful discussion of intertextuality with regard to such texts would appear beset by ambiguities to the point of being doomed from the outset. (2)