07_Biblica_AN_Meek_280-291 15/07/14 12:24 Pagina 282 282 RUSSELL L. MEEK mining the relationships between biblical texts. These two methods cohere with the presupposition that authorial intention controls meaning, and therefore transparently employing their methodology will avoid the charges of inaccurately supplying the label of intertextuality and of being ― as some will presuppose ― inconsistent and therefore unethical. II. Intertextuality Julia Kristeva coined the term “intertextuality” in her 1966 essay, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel” 10. For her work, Kristeva drew on Mikhail Bakhtin, who had focused on the use of specific texts by specific texts, pointing out that “[t]he boundary lines between someone else’s speech and one’s own speech were flexible, ambiguous, often deliberately dis- torted and confused. Certain kinds of texts were constructed like mosaics out of the text of others” 11. Kristeva’s originality lay in her application of Bakhtin’s theory of specific texts to a general theory of how all texts communicate with and relate to each other 12. For Kristeva, and literary theorists after her, a text is much more than words on paper. It is a “net- work of traces” 13 coursing through all communicative media and “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double” 14. Van Wolde goes so far as to argue that until a person reads a text, it is merely “a lifeless collection of words” 15. Thus, as Richard Schultz states, in essence 10 J. KRISTEVA, “Word, Dialogue and Novel”, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Language and Art (ed. L.S. ROUDIEZ; trans. Τ. GORA, A. JARDINE, and L.S. ROUDIEZ) (New York 1980 [1969]) 64-91. For surveys of intertextuality and its counterparts, see MILLER, “Intertextuality in Old Tes- tament Research”, 283-309; and K. SCHMID, “Innerbiblische Schriftausle- gung. Aspekte der Forschungsgeschichte”, Schriftauslegung in der Schrift. Festschrift für Odil Hannes Steck zu seinem 65. Geburtstag (eds. R.G. KRATZ – TH. KRÜGER – K. SCHMID) (BZAW 300; Berlin – New York 2000) 1-22. 11 S. MURRAY, “Intertextuality”, Encyclopedia of Literary Critics and Crit- icism. 2 vols. (ed. C. MURRAY) (London 1999) 1:560; cited in R.L. SCHULTZ, “Intertextuality, Canon, and ‘Undecidability’: Understanding Isaiah’s ‘New Heavens and New Earth’ (Isaiah 65:17-25)”, BBR 20 (2010) 19-38, here 21. 12 SCHULTZ, “Intertextuality, Canon, and ‘Undecidability’”, 21. 13 W.S. VORSTER, “Intertextuality and Redaktionsgeschichte”, Intertextu- ality in Biblical Writings. Essays in Honour of Bas van Iersel (ed. S. DRAISMA) (Kampen 1989) 15-26, here 20-21. 14 KRISTEVA, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel”, 66. 15 VAN WOLDE, “Trendy Intertextuality?” 49.