Much of art lies in the shifting aperture between the shadowy foreimage in the anticipating mind of the observer and the realized revelatory image in the work itself, and that is what we must learn to perceive more finely in the Bible.
-Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, p.62
I love this one-sentence description of what makes for good art! This works for music too and is probably even more obvious in film. Much of Alter’s work is to point out how there is a lot more of this going on in the Bible that most folks realize.