Don Adams, as Maxwell Smart, holding the famous shoe phone. (Wikipedia)
The little story, in Joshua 2, of Rahab and the clueless pair of young Israelite would be spies, provided Spenser (( F. Scott Spencer “Those Riotous – Yet Righteous – Foremothers of Jesus: Exploring Matthew’s Comic Genealogy.” In Are we amused?: humour about women in the biblical worlds, edited by Athalya Brenner, 7-30. Continuum, 2003 )) (see Signs of humour: especially in written texts acr oss cultures) with a nice example of several of his criteria all together in one text, making it evidently humorous.
What do you think? Do the criteria work? Or is this vignette deadly serious?
[…] plenty to guffaw at in the Torah, and has no doubt located some side-splitting episodes in the Former Prophets. But as soon as he hit Ezra, he found that laughs were few and far between. In fact, he’s […]