Josiah and the Torah Book: Comparison of 2 Kgs

Theoreticians of narrative literature-narratologists-value the distinction between temporal and causal order in narrative. Both are seen as more or less reflective of a sometimes hypothetical "actual" sequence of events described by the literary artist. E. M. Forster described the difference vividly: "'The king died and then the queen died' is a narrative [temporal order]. 'The king died, and then the queen died of grief' is a plot [causal order]" (1976, p. 87). But as Roland Barth es says, readers only rarely make the distinction, falling prey to a logical fallacy-post hoc, ergo propter hoc. "Indeed, there is a strong presumption that the mainspring of the narrative activity is to be traced to that very confusion between consecutiveness and consequence, what-comes-after being read in a narrative as what-is-caused-by" (cit. Todorov, 1981, p. 42). Literary theorists are not the only ones to have noticed this common reading practice; authors put it to good use in their manipulations of plot and event sequence. To get a reader thinking that event B is the result of event A, an author need only put the two in the sequence A, B. The least in the kingdom of expositional manipulations at an author's disposal, event sequencing is greater than any explicit expositional voice that the author might use to prepare the way for his tale; greater, because causality is so commonly assumed in temporal sequences. And a reader's assumptions are stronger elements in a tale's power over the reader than anything an author might try to impose by brute expositional force. The authors of biblical narrative were well aware of the expositional value of plot manipulation, as Sternberg has so ably demonstrated ( 1985, esp. chs. 6-8). Their preference, in fact, is to let the tale do its own talking, or more exactly, to let the exposition surface implicitly