Is There a Universal Genre of “Drama”?

Conjectures on the Basis of “Dramatic” Texts in

Old Testament Prophecy, Attic Tragedy,
and Egyptian Cult Plays

Helmut Utzschneider
Augustana Neuendettelsau

The scholarly interpretation of ancient texts is a cross-cultural

undertaking from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective.
The texts of the ancient world must be considered synchronically;
however, they are written in different languages and originate from
different cultural areas. Diachronically, the texts must be interpreted
in a manner that is appropriate to their origin but is meaningful to
modern readers. Thus, concepts of genre have a crucial function.
In literary research, modern concepts of genre are often applied to
ancient texts. For instance, in OT studies in Germany, the biblical
Joseph story and the book of Jonah are sometimes called novelles (which
should not to be confused with the English novel). In German literary
terminology, a novella tells “an event that could happen in reality and
that claims to be new.” 1 A mere transmission of this definition to bib-
lical texts or texts of other ancient literature seems hardly adequate.
Therefore, concepts of genre in a cross-cultural application must be
constructed in a very careful manner. They must span great expanses
of time, they must be meaningful for texts and readers from different
cultures, and last but not least, in doing so, they must correspond to
the general needs and ideas of human communication or behavior. I
would like to call these concepts universal.

Author’s note: A more detailed and expanded German version of this essay, “Ist das
Drama eine universale Gattung? Erwägungen zu den ‘dramatischen’ Texten in der alt.
Prophetie, der attischen Tragödie und im ägyptischen Kultspiel,” is published in my
Gottes Vorstellung: Untersuchungen zur literarischen Ästhetik und ästhetischen Theologie des
Alten Testaments (BWANT 9/15; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2007).
1. G. Schweickle and I. Schweickle, eds., Metzler Literaturlexikon: Begriffe und Defi-
nitionen (2nd ed.; Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990) 329. My translation.

63
64 Helmut Utzschneider

Under modern conditions and based on recent discourse, this may

sound strange. Poststructuralist literary studies maintain a skeptical
attitude toward general concepts as such, toward concepts of genre in
particular, and even more toward the assumption that there could be
suprahistorical, human, or even metaphysical ideas that influence the
production or reception of texts. Suspicion of essentialism lurks every-
where. Therefore, some recent scholars advise renouncing the concept
of genre as such, as do some representatives of historical criticism of the
OT. Nevertheless, modern literary studies as a whole have not bidden
farewell to genres, because they function as a system of communica-
tion. Authors and readers refer to genres. Genres are, according to the
definition of a modern literary scholar, “historical facts” that exist “in
the form of real literary works and as nonobligatory rules or usages
embodied in texts or drafted by contemporary literary theory.” 2
I personally do not see any contradiction between a concept of genre
that is historically constructed and faithful to the texts on the one hand
and related to anthropological essentials or ideas on the other. Thus,
my concept of a universal genre will be somewhat essentialistic.
In the following, I want to present a set of ancient texts that are
called “dramatic” or “drama” in each respective discipline—that is, in
Egyptology, classical studies, and in OT studies. These texts will be the
basis for examining whether there is a “universal” concept of genre
that can be called dramatic or drama that is appropriate to the texts and
meaningful for modern readers. It is assumed that the presence of a
speech is the basic criterion for labeling a work a drama or dramatic,
whereas nonverbal elements such as music and dance are concomitant
elements.
In the first section below, I will give a short introduction and char-
acterize the texts. In the second section, I will demonstrate two literary
criteria that are crucial for understanding texts as being “dramatic.”
Third, I will point out two central social and intellectual functions of
dramatic texts. And finally, I will return to the question of the uni-
versality of the concept dramatic/drama.

The Texts
The texts taken into consideration here originate from the Old
Testament, from Egypt, and from Athens. They stand not only for

2. U. Suerbaum, “Text, Gattung, Intertextualität,” in Ein anglistischer Grundkurs: Ein-

führung in die Literaturwissenschaft (ed. B. Fabian; Berlin: Schmidt, 2004) 82–125, esp. p. 97.
My translation.

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 Is There a Universal Genre of “Drama”? 65

themselves but also for other similar texts, even considerable corpuses
of texts in each area of provenience. The texts are the following:
• Speeches in the books of Micah and Hosea that are representative of the
speeches of the OT prophets
• Texts and images from the reliefs in the Temple of Horus in Edfu in
Middle Egypt, the so-called “Play of Horus,”3 representing the old Egyp-
tian cult plays as transmitted in the “Dramatic Ramesseum Papyrus” or
in the “Mamisi” of the Temple of Isis in Philae4
• Passages in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus 5 as an example of Classical
Attic tragedy
These three texts and the corpuses that they represent are quite near
each other in time of origin.
In the prophetic corpus of the Hebrew Bible, or the OT, there are few
passages going back to the times of the earlier, “classical” prophets,
Amos, Hosea, Micah, or Isaiah, in the late 8th or early 7th century b.c.e.
Most prophetic speeches as well as the structures and plots of the pro-
phetic Scriptures must be traced back to the literary work of the trans-
mitters and redactors in the 6th to 4th centuries b.c.e.
The Attic tragedies were written exclusively in the 5th century in
Athens. Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus is the most recent of all of them;
Sophocles probably finished it in 406, the year of his death. It may have
been staged for the first time in 401, after the siege of Athens by the
Spartans.
For the Egyptian texts that can be interpreted as cult plays, a much
longer span of time must be taken into consideration. The “Dramatic
Ramesseum Papyrus” includes a “Play in Honour of Sesostris I,” a king
of the Twelfth Dynasty, approximately 1950 b.c.e. In contrast, the texts
and pictures of the temple reliefs in Edfu and Philae are Ptolemaic;
that is, they stem from the 4th to 1st centuries b.c.e. Our example, the
Edfu “Play of Horus,” was finished in approximately 110 b.c.e., during
the reign of Ptolemaeus IX Soter II. The subject of the play, The Myth
of Horus, is much older, of course.
Altogether it can be said that most of our texts stem from the
second half of the first millenium b.c.e., but some Egyptian texts are

3. A. M. Blackman and H. W. Fairman, “The Myth of Horus at Edfu—II: The Triumph

of Horus over His Enemies—A Sacred Drama,” JEA 28 (1942) 32–38; JEA 29 (1943) 2–36;
JEA 30 (1944) 5–22. Idem, The Triumph of Horus: An Ancient Egyptian Sacred Drama
(London: Batsford, 1974).
4. See J. C. Goyon, “Dramatische Texte,” LÄ 1:1140–44.
5. Text according to Sophocles, Dramen: Griechisch und deutsch (ed. W. Willige; 3rd
ed.; Zurich: Artemis, 1995). www.gutenberg.org/files/31/31-h/31-h/htm#colonus.
66 Helmut Utzschneider

considerably older. The texts all come from the same cultural area, the
eastern Mediterranean region. Nevertheless, they differ in many re-
spects, and it is difficult to discover any literary dependence, even
though some scholars assume this sort of connection between the pro-
phetic speeches and the Greek tragedies.
It is beyond dispute that the Attic tragedies of the three great
Athenian poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides should be con-
sidered “dramatic.” They were written for the annual theater contest
during the festival of the Great Urban Dionysia in March and April.
They normally were put on stage by their authors in the Theater of
Dionysus in Athens. The theater’s construction and equipment as
well as its ensemble are known to some degree. The ensemble con-
sisted of two to three actors and the choir. We also are generally in-
formed regarding the conventions of the performances, such as the
masks, painting, dances, and music. Attic tragedy is the archetype of
Western European dramatic and stage traditions, and it is mainly re-
sponsible for the close connection between drama and stage. We will
question this close connection in this essay, especially the question
whether acting and performance are essential elements of a dra-
matic text. As is well known, this question has been discussed since
the Poetics of Aristotle.
Whether the Egyptian texts that are interpreted as “dramatic” were
ever put on stage is much less certain than regarding the Attic tra-
gedies. H. W. Fairman, an editor of the “Play of Horus,” concluded that
it was ”a . . . religious drama acted annually at Edfu during the festival
of victory.” 6 It was Fairman‘s edition of the play, not the play itself that
was performed in 1974 by the drama department of a British uni-
versity college. It is very possible that a priestly lecturer declaimed the
text of the play (see below, pp. 77–78). For the actual readers, the dra-
matic character of the play depends exclusively on its texts and on the
relief paintings.
Admittedly, only a minority of OT scholars share the interpretation
of the Hebrew prophetic speeches as dramatic texts. In the German-
speaking context, this minority is represented, for example, by Klaus
Baltzer and, most recently, by Stefan A. Nitsche—apart from myself, of
course. Klaus Baltzer interprets Deutero-Isaiah as a “liturgical drama”
that was performed during the Festival of Unleavened Bread, most
likely in the outer court of the temple in Jerusalem. 7 In Baltzer‘s opinion,

6. Fairman, The Triumph of Horus: An Ancient Egyptian Sacred Drama, 19.

7. K. Baltzer, Deutero-Jesaja (KAT 10/2; Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlag, 1999) 29–38.
See also the English version of this commentary published in in the Hermeneia series.

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 Is There a Universal Genre of “Drama”? 67

Deutero-Isaiah was written in the second half of the 5th century; this
means that it was contemporary with the Attic tragedies. Accordingly,
Baltzer points out several corresponding features in the Greek texts and
in Deutero-Isaiah, such as the so-called hymns of Deutero-Isaiah (for
example, Isa 42:10–13; 44:2–32), which he compares with the chorus in
the Attic tragedies. S. A. Nitsche interpreted the so-called Apocalypse
of Isaiah (Isaiah 24–27) as a dramatic text—initially on the basis of mere
literary criteria. In a second assessment, based on the Isaiah Scroll
(1QIsaa) from Qumran, he showed that the poetic layout of the scroll—
that is, its spatia and paragraphoi—support this interpretation. 8 My own
work in this field is mainly a literary analysis of the books of Micah and
Hosea. 9 In the opinion of the above-mentioned exegetes, including my-
self, the literary form of the text is decisive for its dramatic character,
as I will show.

Literary Criteria of Dramatic Texts

As demonstrated in detail in my work on Micah, there are primar-
ily two literary criteria by which texts are characterized as “dramatic”:
(1) by means of direct speeches and addresses, changing speakers,
themes, and perspectives, they evoke the impression of actors’ en-
trances; (2) the speeches visualize the scene of the entrances—in other
words, they stage the location and other visual circumstances em-
bodied in the speeches. Both criteria will now be demonstrated.
Speech as Scenic Entrance
Onstage, an entrance, which is “the appearance or exit of at least
one person,” 10 is the smallest unit of acting. In dramatic texts as we
know them, entrances are denoted and delimited by stage directions
that announce by name the next person speaking. In prophetic texts,
there are no stage directions of this sort. 11 This is why the texts are not
identifiable as dramatic texts at first glance. Nevertheless, entrances
give structure to the prophetic speeches. These structured entrances

8. S. A. Nitsche, Jesaja 24–27: Ein dramatischer Text. Die Frage nach den Genres prophet-
ischer Literatur des Alten Testaments und die Textgraphik der großen Jesajarolle aus Qumran
(BWANT 166; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2006) passim.
9. H. Utzschneider, Micha (ZBKAT 24/1; Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 2005) passim;
idem, “Situation und Szene: Überlegungen zum Verhältnis historischer und literarischer
Deutung prophetischer Texte am Beispiel von Hos 5,8–6,6,” ZAW 114 (2002) 80–105.
10. B. Asmuth, Einführung in die Dramenanalyse (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994) 41.
11. By the way, as far as we know the earliest manuscripts of Greek dramatic texts
did not announce the next speaker by name but with poetic alignment or paragraphs set
off with spaces, as S. A. Nitsche found in the Qumran manuscripts.
68 Helmut Utzschneider

are identifiable by mere textual signals, especially by change of

speaker or addressed persons, who are indicated by the personal pro-
nouns “you,” “I,” or “we”; or by announcing the next speaker by his or
her name or function. Entrances are also emphasized by other textual
or structural signals, such as by a change of theme or perspective. This
may be demonstrated by considering the Prologue of the book of
Micah (Mic 1:2–7) as an example:
2 Listen, peoples, all of you!
Pay attention, Earth and her fullness.
The lord, Yhwh, is against you as a witness,
The lord, Yhwh, from his holy palace.
3 Yea, behold, Yhwh is setting out from his place,
He is descending and trampling upon the heights of the earth.
4 The mountains are melting beneath him,
valleys are splitting open [meanwhile],
like wax in the presence of fire,
like water cascading down a sluice.
5 All of these are because of Jacob‘s misconduct
and because of the sins of the house of Israel.
What is Jacob‘s misconduct?
Is it not Samaria?
What is the height of Judah?
Is it not Jerusalem?
6 And so I will make Samaria into stones for vineyards.
And I will pour her stones into the valley.
And her foundations I will lay bare.
7 And all her carved images will be scattered,
all her gifts will be burned by fire,
and all her idols I will make a desolation.
For from the fee of a prostitute she gathered them,
and a fee of a prostitute they shall become.

Verse 2 begins with an imperative, that is, with direct speech, but the
speaker is not mentioned. Nevertheless, the entrance of this speaker is
implied. He or she cannot be God, because God is mentioned in the
third colon of the verse in third person. The speech is addressed to “the
peoples, all of you.” Their presence is presupposed—in whatever form.
Verses 3 and 4 represent the second entrance. They are separated
from the preceding entrance by the Hebrew ki, a formative signal; in
the English translation, this is rendered “Yea.” Moreover, there is a
change of theme, and the speech has a new direction. The peoples are
no longer the addressees. A spectacular advent of God, a theophany, is
 Is There a Universal Genre of “Drama”? 69

depicted. The character of the text as direct speech is indicated by the

Hebrew particle hinneh. Connected with a participle, it forms a futu-
rum instans–construction. This construction presupposes the presence
of a speaker. We are reminded of the so-called teichoscopia, with the
prophet as speaker.
The last entrance is separated from the preceding by the textual
signals in v. 5: the connecting phrase “all of these” is a back-reference;
the questions open a new speech. In v. 6, it is clear that the speaker
represented by the pronoun “I” is God. The destruction of the city of
Samaria is depicted as in the preceding theophany in vv. 3–4.
As a whole, the scene consists of three entrances. In the first en-
trance, the people are addressed by an unknown speaker, probably the
prophet; in the second entrance, the prophet depicts a theophany; and
in the third, Yhwh himself is the speaker. The theophany and the
speech by God point at the temple as the location of the scene.
Speech as Performance
Dramatic texts and theater are closely connected. I want to make the
case in this essay that dramatic texts in themselves are theatrical in the
sense of the Greek word qeavomai, which means ‘to look at, to behold’.
Dramatic texts are inherently (audio-)visual without being staged.
What do the speaking or addressed persons look like? How are they
dressed? What is their facial expression? In which environment do
they move? Which noises accompany the performance of the actors?
By implicitly answering these questions, the texts themselves are “syn-
aesthetic.”
I want to demonstrate this by considering some passages in Sopho-
cles’ Oedipus at Colonus. Especially in the prologue and the parodos,
Sophocles sketches an outline of the location of the whole play. As a
stranger and a suppliant (¥kevthÍ; see below) looking for a resting
place, the blind Oedipus, guided by his daughter Antigone arrives at
a region that Antigone describes as an idyllic place near Athens.
There are laurels and olives, and a nightingale is singing (lines 16–19).
This short description of the Attic landscape is repeated and amplified
in a famous chorus later in the play (lines 668–94).
Not only is the background of the scenery depicted in speeches, so
are the visual elements of the story and the persons themselves. Anti-
gone asks her father to sit down on an unhewn stone (line 19). An
inhabitant of Colonus who happens to be passing by wants to drive
Oedipus from his resting place: “The spot thou treadest on is holy
ground!” (line 39). But Oedipus refuses to leave, and so the man from
70 Helmut Utzschneider

Colonus departs to ask his fellow-citizens for advice. Meanwhile,

Oedipus and Antigone hide themselves in a grove, waiting for the de-
cision of the citizens of Colonus. It arrives in the shape of the chorus;
Oedipus appears and terrifies the men of Colonus with his appear-
ance and his voice: “O dread to see and dread to hear!” (line 140). But
they call him to come closer, guided by Antigone. Oedipus’s steps out
of the grove are depicted by repeated exchanges, which illustrate the
burdensome walk of the old and blind man:
“Thy hand then!”
“Here, O father, is my hand.”
...
“Shall I go further?”
“Aye.”
“What, further still?”
...
“Follow with blind steps, father, as I lead.” (lines 170–83)
So, the speech’s content imagines the location and the actions carried
out by the characters. The German technical term Wortkulisse 12 refers
to scenery included in texts. Of course, these textual Wortkulissen need
to be supported by the readers’ imaginations, and gaps must be filled
in by means of intertextual knowledge. For instance, the horror evoked
by the appearance of Oedipus is illustrated in the audience’s memory
of the fact that Oedipus blinded himself with his own hand in Sopho-
cles’ Oedipus the King (line 1268). In a way, the reader is like the blind
Oedipus: “Ears to the blind, they say, are eyes” (line 138), or in the
translation of Ernst Buschor: Mein Auge ist das Ohr. Ich sehe die Rede
(‘My eye is my ear. I see the speech’). This is exactly what is meant by
Wortkulisse.
It would be interesting to compare this performance in the imagi-
nation of readers and listeners with our knowledge of the staging of
Oedipus at Colonus in Athens in the 6th century b.c.e. I suppose that
acting the play on a real stage needs the cooperation of the audience to
the same extent that reader cooperation is necessary in a Wortkulisse.
And both—the real stage with its scenery and the Wortkulisse—depend
on the dramatic text. I think that Aristotle was right when he insisted
that both ‘imagination’ (oßysiÍ) and ‘performance’ (aßg∫n) are based on
the textual capacities of the drama, such as the plot (muÅqoÍ), the
persons, and the speech (levxiÍ; see Aristotle, Poetics 1450b).

12. Asmuth, Einführung in die Dramenanalyse, 52.

 Is There a Universal Genre of “Drama”? 71

Functions of Dramatic Texts

The Imagining of Mythological and
Historical Narratives in Dramatic Texts
It is common in the OT prophetic literature for speeches to be em-
bedded in narratives and vice versa. The extensive narratives in the
book of Jeremiah are well known in this regard. In the Hebrew version,
the narratives (Jeremiah 26–45) appear within a framework of speeches
(Jeremiah 2–25/46–51). In the Minor Prophets, there are also narratives
embedded in speeches—for instance, at the beginning of Hosea.
The book of Micah is one of The Twelve works that is without (or
nearly without) any narrative. Nevertheless, clear connections with
the historical narratives of the OT can easily be found. My first ex-
ample is the word of doom against Zion in Mic 3:12:
Therefore on account of you Zion will be ploughed like a field
And Jerusalem will become a rubble heap
And the mountain of the house (will become) heights of the forest.13
The prophetic word is found once more as a quotation in narrative
in the book of Jeremiah (Jer 26:18–19). This narrative flashes back to
the time of Jeremiah from the end of the 7th century to the end of the
8th century b.c.e. It deals with the conflict between the prophet Micah
and the representatives of the Jerusalem kingdom and Hezekiah him-
self. If one relates the narrative and the word of Micah to the Assyrian
conquest of Israel and Judah, Micah’s word of prophecy appears to be
holding Jerusalem responsible. According to the narrative, Hezekiah
repented his sins and therefore Jerusalem was not captured. However,
in the time of Jer 26:18–19, Jerusalem is being threatened by the Baby-
lonians. Jeremiah warns and requires repentance. But Jehoiakim re-
fuses to repent and Jeremiah is threatened with the death penalty. So
in Jeremiah 26, Micah’s oracle and the obedience of Hezekiah function
as a contrast with the disobedience and misconduct of Jehoiakim. In
the book of Micah itself, the prophetic word is clearly connected with
the capture of Jerusalem by the Babylonians (see Mic 4:8–10).
Another example of the relationship between a prophetic speech
and the traditions of the Assyrian conquest appears in Mic 1:10–16. In
this poem, the scene of the Assyrian campaign of 701 b.c.e. is repro-
duced. In some sort of flashlight-teichoscopia, the speaker shows the

13. Translation according to F. I. Andersen and D. N. Freedman, Micah: A New Trans-

lation with Introduction and Commmentary (AB 24E; New York: Doubleday, 2000) 378.
72 Helmut Utzschneider

destruction of towns and villages surrounding Jerusalem, whereas the

undamaged city, which in v. 16 is depicted as “mother,” is requested to
be in mourning for her children.
10 In Gath don’t report it,
don’t weep at all!
In Beth-leaphrah
roll yourselves in the dust!
11 Pass on your way,
inhabitants of Shapir,
in nakedness and shame.
...
(to the mother Jerusalem:)
16 Make yourself bald and cut off your hair
for the children of your delight!
Make yourself as bald as the eagle,
for they have gone from you into exile.
In the OT, a number of narratives can be found that deal with this
memorable situation (2 Kgs 18–20; Isaiah 20). The narratives show that
the experience of the destruction of Judah and the salvation of Jeru-
salem has been made paradigmatic of the official political theology in
the Jerusalem kingdom in the 7th and 6th centuries b.c.e. The drama-
tization of this narrative tradition in prophetic speeches not only trans-
ported the experiences of the past into the present for the listeners but
also updated these experiences with new interpretations. The speeches
allowed the listeners to take part in these events and at the same time
showed them in a new light for each new generation of listeners. So the
speeches are both: a renewal and a generalization of the traditions.
A quite similar type of intertextuality can be found in the relation-
ship between the Attic tragedies and the narrative traditions of old
Greek myths and epics. “The material of tragedy is myth,” 14 says Hell-
mut Flashar, a well-known German interpreter of Sophocles. Apart
from oral traditions and vase paintings, poetry, especially epic poetry
is the most important source for the tragedies. They imagine, interpret,
and generalize the traditions of the past, just as the prophetic speeches
do. Once more, Hellmut Flashar states, “The present is reflected in the
past and becomes available for generalization.” 15
Quite striking is the intertextuality between the “Play of Horus”
and a narrative version of the Horus myth called the “Myth of the

14. H. Flashar, Sophokles: Dichter im demokratischen Athen (Munich: Beck, 2000) 18

(translations mine).
15. Ibid.
 Is There a Universal Genre of “Drama”? 73

Winged Disk.” 16 This myth is depicted in the register above the play on
the same wall in the Edfu temple precinct. The contents of the myth
and the play are closely related, for example, in the use of the hip-
popotamuses as images of mythical and political enemies and in har-
pooning as the method of destroying them. Possibly both texts were
read, though at different feasts.
Thus, in the Egyptian cult plays, the same connection between
imagining and generalization of mythical and epic traditions can be
detected as in the dramatic texts from Israel and Greece. J. P. Sørensen
points out the transparency of the mythical Horus to the present king,
which is imagined and performed in the play:
primeval and present are dramatically juxtaposed and made to mirror
each other as the stages in a redundant mythical process. Although the
drama delineates a descent from primeval to present level, from hippo-
potamus to human enemy, from Horus to Ptolemy IX, it does not in a his-
torical sense narrate the story of how the present condition came to be.
Rather it recasts the present in its mythical form and shows it, idealized
in terms of royal ideology, as variation on a mythical theme.17
Consequently, it can be said that the intertextuality between dramatic
speeches and historical epic played an important role in the three cul-
tural realms. In dramatic texts, significant traditions of the past were
imagined, interpreted, and generalized.
Drama as Reflected Ritual
The cultural anthropologist Victor Turner pointed out that there
could be a mutual, perhaps even a dialectical relation between social
dramas and cultural performances. Life is both an imitation of art and
vice versa. 18 Doris Bachman-Medick has carried on this approach.
Social rituals and stage dramas are both concerned with situations of
liminality that are faced by societies as well as by individuals. Birth,
marriage, and death are some of these situations, which are important
motifs in social life and in literary dramas. However, literary dramas

16. See A. Egberts, “Mythos und Fest: Überlegungen zur Dekoration der westlichen
Innenseite der Umfassungsmauer im Tempel von Edfu,” in 4. Ägyptische Tempeltagung:
Feste im Tempel (ed. R. Gundlach and M. Rochholz; Ägypten und Altes Testament 33/2;
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998) 17–29. D. Kurth, Treffpunkt der Götter: Inschriften aus dem
Tempel des Horus (Zurich: Artemis, 1994) 217.
17. J. P. Sørensen, “Three Varieties of Ritual Drama,” Temenos 22 (1986) 79–92, esp.
p. 83.
18. See V. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York:
Performing Arts Journal, 1982).
74 Helmut Utzschneider

are not simply reproductions of social dramas. Dramas are reflections

of rituals; that is, rituals can be justified, distanced, criticized by lit-
erary dramas, and even led ad absurdum. A good example in modern
theater of a reflected ritual is Bertolt Brecht’s play Kleinbürgerhochzeit. 19
I am convinced that this approach is also appropriate for our ancient
dramatic texts and is able to shed new light on them. In all these texts,
rituals are present in one way or another. I turn to examples.
The second part (or “scene,” as I see it) of Micah (Mic 1:8–2:6) is full
of references to mourning rituals: the nakedness and crying of the
prophet (Mic 1:8, 10), the forbidden weeping of the people of Gath
(Mic 1:10), the rolling in the dust (1:10), the baldness of Mother Jeru-
salem (Mic 1:16), and last but not least, the Woe speech of the prophet
in Mic 2:1–2 as the climax:
1 Woe—planners of iniquity and doers of evil on their beds
In the light of the morning they do it,
Because they are mighty
2 When they covet fields,
then they seize [them]
and houses
they steel them. 20
The Woe speech intrinsically belongs to the mourning ritual for a de-
ceased individual. In the normal course of the ritual, it introduces the
obituary for the deceased. In this speech, the mourners imagine the
bereavement they suffer. In Mic 2:1, the Woe speech is definitely not
used for this function. It is intentionally distanced and used to point
out the consequences of the evil done by the mourned ones. Of course,
these doers of evil are quite alive, but their deeds are lethal to their
victims and, in the long run, to themselves. Christof Hardmeier called
these Woe speeches Trauermetaphorik ‘metaphors of mourning’ and
stressed their rhetorical function. He is quite right—but that is not all.
The citations of rituals portray those who cite them in a role. By citing
a ritual out of context with its intrinsic function, the prophet becomes
an actor and the ritual a drama.
A very interesting case of a reflected ritual appears in Hos 6:1–6.
The poem in Hos 6:1–3 is usually understood as a “community lament”

19. See D. Bachman-Medick, “Kulturelle Spielräume: Drama und Theater im Licht

ethnologischer Ritualforschung,” in Kultur als Text: Die anthropologische Wende in der Li-
teraturwissenschaft (ed. D. Bachmann-Medick; 2nd ed.; Tübingen: Francke, 2004) 98–121,
esp. p. 102.
20. Translation by Andersen and Freedman, Micah, 257 (revised slightly).

Long to Match
 Is There a Universal Genre of “Drama”? 75

or a part of it. In the ritual itself, a common lament is normally fol-

lowed by an oracle from God, who responds to the lament; of course,
an oracle of salvation is expected. Indeed, in Hos 6:4–5 God becomes
the speaker. But with this oracle, the structure of the lament is both
maintained and broken.
The lament of the people:
1 Come, let us return to Yhwh!
Although he tore us apart, he will heal us.
Although he smashed us, he will bandage us.
2 He will revive us after two days,
and on the third day he will raise us up.
We will live in his presence so that we know him.
3 We will pursue knowledge of Yhwh.
His utterance is as certain as sunrise.
He will come like rain for us.
Like spring rain, he will water the earth.
This is followed by a speech of Yhwh addressed to the people:
4 How shall I deal with you, Ephraim?
How shall I deal with you, Judah?
Your mercy passes away like a morning cloud,
and like early dew, it passes away.
In the lament, the people assure themselves of the certitude of God’s
salvation and expect a positive oracle. In the following oracle, God
doubts the truthfulness of the people and denies their expectations.
There is a negative correspondence between God’s own reliability and
the people’s loyalty. In my opinion, this means that the dramatic text is
criticizing and rejecting the ritual of public lament, because it has lost
its foundation. And it does so by using the forms and language of the
ritual. But this is not the end. In the last part of his speech, Yhwh in-
troduces a new theological perspective on his relation to Israel, a rela-
tionship that is not founded on rituals but on ˙esed (which means
‘mercy’ or ‘loyalty’, or even ‘love’) and knowledge.
6 For I desire mercy rather than sacrifice
and knowledge rather than offerings.
Finally, OT rituals are used to structure a prophetic book or parts of
it. The second part of the book of Micah (Micah 6–7), for instance, is
structured as a rîb ‘lawsuit’, including all parts of it such as the hearing
of evidence, accusation, sentence, and act of grace.
The relation between ritual and drama that we have illustrated with
OT dramatic texts can also be supported by Greek tragedies. F. Zeitlin
76 Helmut Utzschneider

has shown in detail that the tragedies contain the whole ritual world of
ancient Greece: rites of purification and expiation, suppliant and apo-
tropaic ritual, rituals of celebration, and mantic rituals, not forgetting
the rites de passage surrounding birth, marriage, and death. 21
Similar to prophetic books, tragedies can be constructed around
rituals. In particular, the ritual of ¥keteÇa (‘supplication’) has lent its
structures and themes to classical tragedies. The ¥keteÇa is a ritual by
which strangers ritually plead for the right to settle among other eth-
nic groups. Aeschylus and Euripides wrote plays entitled IketÇdeÍ
‘suppliants’. And also our example, Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, is on
the whole designed as a ¥keteÇa. Oedipus and his daughter plead for
permission to stay in Colonus. But there are obstacles: the citizens of
Colonus reject their supplication at first. Creon and Polyneices try to
force them to return to Thebes. It is Theseus, the ruler of Athens, who
ensures that Oedipus and Antigone can remain in Colonus. Ulti-
mately, however, Oedipus dies and finds asylum and rest in a tomb in
the holy grove of Colonus. Against this background and based on the
ritual of ¥keteÇa, the aged Sophocles was facing death and was proba-
bly reflecting his own life and, in doing so, the fate of humankind.
A highly sophisticated use of rituals can be seen in Sophocles’ Anti-
gone. By contrasting the rituals of power and mourning, Sophocles
designs the two antagonistic characters of his play: Creon and Anti-
gone. Antigone resists the rituals of power by performing the rituals of
mourning to an excessive extent. This may be understood as a critical
attitude toward ritual as such; a new perspective on the motives of
human behavior is winning the upper hand over the ritual layer. Anti-
gone expresses this perspective in her famous words: “Love and not
hatred is the part for me” (line 524).
The relationship to ritual seems to me to be rather close both for the
dramatic texts of the Hebrew Bible and for the Greek tragedies. In
both, rituals are reflected, distanced, and criticized. This may merely
be a poetic device for constructing plots or developing characters. But
to me it appears more and more to be a way to open up new theological
or anthropological perspectives.
Let us now have a short look at the world of Egyptian cult plays.
In the “Play of Horus,” a bridge is built between the dramatic text
and performance, on the one hand, and the ritual itself, on the other,

21. See F. I. Zeitlin, The Ritual World of Greek Tragedy (Ph.D. diss., Colombia Univer-
sity, 1970) passim.
 Is There a Universal Genre of “Drama”? 77

Fig. 1. Scene from Edfu showing a scene from the “Play of Horus.” First pub-
lished by Émile Chassinat, Le Temple d’Edfou, vol. 10, fasc. 2 (Cairo: Insti-
tut Française d’Archéologie orientale, 1960), pl. 146. Copyright ç IFAO.

especially in the last scene of the play. 22 Figure 1 shows a butcher

slaughtering a Hippopotamus, a priest reading a papyrus scroll (prob-
ably the play itself), and the king feeding a goose with corn. The dra-
matic text on the left side of the image opens with a description of the
victorious king:
The King of Upper and Lower Egypt
Son of Re
(Ptolemaeus-may-he-live-for-ever-Beloved of Ptah)
is triumphant in the broad hall,
he has overthrown the Mnryw of all the countries of Asia.
Lo he is triumphant in the broad hall,
he has suppressed his enemies,
he has taken hold of his back,
he has clutched the foes by their forelocks.
What follows are “stage directions” that repeat the image in words and
introduce the concluding hymn:
Bringing in the Hippopotamus in form of a cake before
him-with-the-uplifted-arm.
Dismembering by the butcher.

22. Blackman and Fairman, “The Myth of Horus at Edfu—II,” JEA 30 (1944) 13–15.
Fairman, The Triumph of Horus, 113 (fig. 1).
78 Helmut Utzschneider

Recital of this Book against him by the chief lector on the twenty-first
day of the second month of Proyet.
To be spoken by the prophets, the fathers of the god, and the priests: . . .23
In this last scene of the play, characters act in sacral roles but in human
ways. In addition to the chorus and the king, mainly Gods—Horus,
Isis, Seth—have been speaking and acting in the preceding scenes. The
hippopotamus, which represented Seth and was harpooned by the God
Horus in the preceding scenes, is now present in the form of a cake,
which must be divided. My assumption is that the last scene of the
“Play of Horus” represents the interface between ritual and drama. The
preceding mythological scenes or speeches of the drama aim toward
the ritual depicted in the last scene. Or seen the other way around, the
ritual, which is celebrated every year, is the last part of a mythical act
that recurs in a dramatic performance. We may imagine this perfor-
mance as a “real” play on stage, as declaimed by a priest, or simply as a
mute relief on the western wall of the temple precinct.
The connection between drama and ritual is a crucial moment for
the dramatic texts of antiquity (and presumably, not only in antiquity).
However, this connection appears in quite different shapes. In Egypt,
the connection is very close. There is as far I can see no intellectual gap
between drama and ritual; on the basis of myth, they are intertwined.
Thus, drama reflects ritual in that drama gives the mythological reason
for the ritual. In Greece and in Israel, however, we observe a more com-
plicated and distant relationship. The function of justifying ritual dis-
appears. The citation of ritual can be a poetic device. The alienation
from rituals can be seen as a means of characterizing or criticizing the
participants in the rituals. Even the rituals themselves can be put into
question.

Drama as a Universal Genre?

It was the aim of our examination to construct a concept of dramatic
genre that might be called “universal” because it spans great cultural
distances from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective and be-
cause it is linked to basic human needs and ideas. On a broad basis of
ancient Mediterranean texts, it can be demonstrated that speeches that
form an actor’s “entrance” (pp. 67–69) and that educe scenic imagery
(pp. 69–70) meet the basic literary criteria for being considered dra-

23. Text according to Blackman and Fairman, “The Myth of Horus at Edfu—II,” JEA
30 (1944) 13.
 Is There a Universal Genre of “Drama”? 79

matic texts. These criteria can be applied not only to texts in the clas-
sical and modern theatrical tradition but also to texts that have been
declaimed or have been transmitted and read only in written and
illustrated form. As basically dramatic texts, they also can be shown to
fulfill certain social and intellectual functions. They imagine and
renew historical and mythical traditions of their society by interpret-
ing and generalizing them (pp. 71–73). However, they can also reflect
the ritual texts of their society by justifying, distancing, or criticizing
the rituals (pp. 73–78).
Regardless of many differences, the texts compared above are simi-
lar enough to subsume them in a genre called dramatic texts. The func-
tions of these dramatic texts are not confined to antiquity: (1) renewing
and interpreting fundamental traditions by transmitting them in
“great narratives” and (2) reflecting social or religious rituals are basic
needs and ideas that are part of human communication and behavior.
Therefore, this genre can rightly be called universal.