Story in Israel was intended for the practice of imagination

Brueggemann believes that the speaker has as much freedom as the hearer in deciding what is happening in a story. (Walter Brueggemann, The Creative Word, 24). He says:

There is no straight-line communication of data from speaker to listener. There is an open field of speech between the parties that admits to many alternative postures. This means that the listener has nearly as much freedom as the speaker in deciding what is happening. The listener is expected to work as resiliently as the teller. The communication between the two parties is a bonding around images, metaphors, and symbols that are never flattened to coercive instruction. Israel has enormous confidence in its narrative speech, sure that the images and metaphors will work their own way, will reach the listener at the point of his or her experience, and will function with a claiming authority. Such communication is shared practice of the secret which evokes imagination.” It includes the listener in the secret, thus forcing the awareness of an insider. And it serves to draw a line on the other side of the listener, distancing the listener from all the outsiders who do not know the secret.” That is, once the secret is known, it cannot be not known. The telling of the secret evokes imaginative work in the listener. Thus the practice of imagination moves, on the one hand, with liberation. The listener has freedom to hear and decide, and is expected to decide. On the other hand, however, the story moves with authority to claim people for the inside. The authority that moves through it is not only the authority of the teller, but also the authority of the story. Israel’s imagination is liberated and liberating. That does not mean unlimited and undisciplined, as though anything goes. The imagination of Israel is circumscribed by the scope of the stories about which there is consensus. Israel has a covenant with its tongue that the evoking of imagination does not move outside this consensus. We shall see that in the other parts of Israel’s canon, there is a breaking beyond this consensus. For the Torah, however, it is enough to accept the consensus and to move around in it fully. It is the consensus on which stories are based that defines the arena for free imagination.

If Brueggemann is saying, and it is unclear to me, that there is no historical setting behind the story, then I would disagree. I am not yet convinced that history and grammar are to be given up in our quest to hear the meaning of a story. Surely, the storytellers told their stories within a context with a purpose in mind and the collectors of these stories via inscripturating then place them in a certain order for a purpose. The author(s) of the Pentateuch did not start with the story of the Exodus, as important as it was, but placed it in its context for some purpose. I often wonder if those who espouse a “reading from in front” of the text would allow those reading their text to make of it what they will. I think not!