A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died,” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief,” is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. Conclusions: “The Plot within the Piyyut” Piyyutim are not “stories” in the way many biblical narratives are. Nor are piyyutin a variety of “retold Bible” (such as Jubilees or Pirke deRabbi Eliezer) or narrative modes of exegesis and interpretation, including midrash and targum—all forms in which later writers smooth over. This is what I have always understood the difference between plot and story as being in film studies. Story is the chronological events that occur within the narrative. Plot is how these events are presented on screen. Of course, in literature, plot is the series of related events that occur within a story. A story within a story occurs when some sort of tale is told to characters who exist within the main narrative of a work of fiction. Also found in live theater, TV shows, and film along with written books, this literary technique implants a nested narrative within the main story. Sometimes, the nested story contains its own story within a story. . Narrative is the technique of storytelling while the plot is the story, or rather the substance of the story itself. Narrative includes the perspective or the emotions and feelings of the narrator while the plot is how the events unfold inside the story.

Narrative Plot Meaning
Difference Between Plot And Narrative
Narrative Plot Structure

Laura Lieber
Duke University

“God made Man because He loves stories.”
—Elie Wiesel, prologue to Gates of the Forest

The Torah is more than “merely” a book of stories,¹ but few would deny that between the creation of the world and the death of Moses, many memorable and dramatic stories are told. Far from being simple ornaments, biblical tales are memorable, consequential, and inextricably interwoven with other kinds of writings, notably genealogies, prophecies, laws, and poems. While it can be easy to take the Torah’s stories for granted—as they are, after all, so familiar (at least in vague outline) and often deceptively straightforward—we should not underestimate the importance of storytelling as a human endeavor. Received narratives, the tales we imbibe from earliest youth, ground us in traditions—familial, cultural, or religious—and inform the stories we tell ourselves; they shape our values and our worldviews. As contemporary scholars ranging from theologians to psychologists to medical school professors have noted, our internal stories dictate the scripts against which we measure our lives.² As humans (Jonathan Gottschall’s “storytelling animals”³), each individual is the protagonist of his or her own tale, but as singular as our individual lives are, the “plots” we map onto and narrate into our autobiographies are unique syntheses of older material reworked.

Over the millennia, the biblical text has provided a particularly rich and evocative source for the construction of identity—of autobiographical self-narration—among those who see themselves as the heirs of the biblical ancestors. This is certainly true in the Jewish context, where the many references to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as the fathers of the Israelite nation resonate through the millennia as speaking directly to the “children of Israel,” their lineal descendants. Viewed through such a lens, the biblical stories function not just as the sacred history of a nation but also as family lore, as a kind of inherited memory.⁴ Current events constitute the newest chapters in the ongoing tale, and each recipient of the tradition becomes a new character in the still-unfolding story.

The liturgical context, in which the biblical text was (and still is) both recited and explicated, amplifies the power of the biblical text to shape its listeners’ interior narrations. Read in the sanctuary, the Torah scroll speaks directly to the people in imitation of the revelation at Sinai, an event that becomes, in practice as well as in theory, an ongoing experience rather than a singular occurrence.⁵ In the synagogue of Late Antiquity, midrashic homilies and Aramaic translations (targumim) further underscored the continuing significance of the biblical words in the present tense. Likewise, Jewish liturgical poetry (called piyyut), which was experienced not in the context of the Torah service but in the context of prayer, translated narration into something actively enjoined rather than passively received and experienced “only” intellectually.⁶ The liturgical content and context of piyyut served to embed the retelling of biblical stories in highly-charged ritual performance and to embody it within the community.⁷ Through rhetorical techniques such as refrains, which integrate the audience into the performance, the listeners would join their voices as well as their sympathies to the retelling. The liturgical poet (in Hebrew, payyetan) mediated and structured the relationships between his text and his community of listeners as much as between congregation and deity. Viewed this way, then, we can imagine the individuals in the community of the ancient synagogue as engaging in a complicated “multi-authorship” dynamic, participating in the performance—the activation—of the piyyutas effective prayer. Each participant, whether physically present (the poet-cantor and the community) or assumed (the ancestors, the deity) in the performative dynamic shapes the story the others hear even as he becomes an implied character in the tale he tells.

Liturgical poets were not, of course, “storytellers” in a conventional sense; piyyutim, particularly compared to other genres of synagogue literature, are non-linear and oriented as much toward the rituals of prayer as toward the interpretation or elaboration of the biblical text. And yet, payyetanic engagement with biblical stories was sustained and sophisticated, and examining the narrative elements of classical piyyut can illustrate some of the more complicated ways in which storytelling was an important part of the communal experience of the ancient synagogue.⁸ Payyetanim taught their listeners ways of re-narrating a story, a self-conception, to their communities (and arguably to their deity, too), and they were doing so self-consciously. They did not, however, simply put the biblical tales into new language or enrich them with new details; they wove a new story—a meaningful narrative for their contemporary listeners—out of the images, language, and concerns of the inherited material, freely transforming, adapting, and embellishing the received tradition and shaping it in ways that would explicitly engage their communities.

As intuitive as some of these ideas may seem, a specific example, worked through in detail, will clarify more precisely how poets transformed biblical stories into constructive and consequential narratives for their communities. The selection of a well-known biblical tale will help to highlight the differences between biblical and payyetanic storytelling, and so the present essay examines one of the more famous stories from the biblical book of Numbers: that of Balak, the king of Moab, who hires the prophet Balaam to curse the Israelites in Numbers 22-24.⁹ This story may have originated in folklore (as indicated by the external evidence of the Deir Alla inscription¹⁰), and it possesses unique charm and humor; it is a good story for telling, and ancient exegetes displayed great creativity in expanding the tale. Because it was part of the lectionary, this biblical pericope also provided fodder for the great payyetanim, including Yannai, the master-poet of the 6^th century whose piyyut—specifically the kind of piyyut called a qedushta¹¹—for the Torah portion which opened with Num. 22:2 has survived almost intact among the treasures of the Cairo Genizah.¹² This nearly-complete piyyut—eight of the nine units standard in this form are extant—provides an opportunity to examine the various ways in which the poet selected and distilled key elements from a received story and transformed it into something of his own.

The Biblical Story

The biblical story of Balak and Balaam, as we have it in the Masoretic text, displays signs of a complicated redactional history but has long been recognized as a distinctive unit.¹³ The complexities of the biblical

Plots Within A Narrative Are