Clarity and mystery mingle as we move through these stories. In the formula of one scholar, the storytellers of the Bible tell us the truth, but not the whole truth.6 What they tell us is reliable, but they leave so much unsaid. For the most part they describe but do not explain what happened. The result, already noted, is that it is easy to grasp the basic action in a biblical story, but difficult to interpret all of its meaning and all of its human dynamics. So far as characterization is concerned,