07_Biblica_AN_Meek_280-291 24/07/14 09:40 Pagina 283 INTERTEXTUALITY 283 “the emphasis shifts from users to uses and every expression carries with it semantic freight from other contexts in which it is employed” 16. Given these notions of texts and their relationships with each other, a few important implications arise for those who use (or claim to use) this methodology. First, the “text” in intertextuality is broken free from the constraints of the written word 17. This is problematic for studies that pur- port to examine the written words of the Bible and seek to understand their relationships among each other. Faithful adherence to this method- ology requires one to consider not only the written text but also the un- written oral traditions that may lie behind it. This introduces a peculiar methodological problem, for one could discount nearly any proposed tex- tual relationship with the notion that two written texts rely not on each other but on a separate oral tradition 18. Cynthia Edenburg mitigates this difficulty by “taking a methodological stance which undertakes to con- sider all known evidence. Unknown witnesses cannot be considered evi- dence; in the eventuality that a new witness is uncovered, then it becomes potential evidence, but until then it cannot be other than a non-entity” 19. However, Edenburg’s methodology is explicitly concerned with inner- biblical allusion, not intertextuality. If she held to the latter, then such a methodological stance would be “nonsensical” 20. Studies that would use a presuppositional stance to push aside the idea of an oral tradition un- derlying the suggested textual relationships are no longer employing an intertextual method. Second, intertextuality is unconcerned with issues of determinacy or diachronic trajectory. What matters for intertextual theorists is the “net- work of traces”, not their origin or direction of influence. Furthermore, intertextuality is concerned with “a wide range of correspondences among texts”, and it “examines the relations among many texts” rather than the relationship between a narrow set of texts 21. Thus, intertextuality is a strictly synchronic discussion of wide-ranging intertextual relationships that necessarily precludes author-centered, diachronic studies. This dis- tinction should not be taken lightly because the term intertextuality leads 16 SCHULTZ, “Intertextuality, Canon, and ‘Undecidability’”, 21. 17 However, see Cynthia Edenburg’s work on different types of intertex- tuality, which distinguishes between aural and literary intertextual strategies; see C. EDENBURG, “Intertextuality, Literary Competence and the Question of Readership: Some Preliminary Observations”, JSOT 35 (2010) 131-148. 18 See NOBLE, “Esau, Tamar, and Joseph”, 220. 19 C. EDENBURG, “How (Not) to Murder a King: Variations on a Theme in 1 Sam 24; 26”, SJOT 12 (1998) 64-85, here 71. 20 MILLER, “Intertextuality”, 294. 21 SOMMER, “Exegesis, Allusion, and Intertextuality”, 487.