Archaeology and the Bible
The idea of the Bible as literature became prominent during the last two decades of the aoth century and produced a paradigm shift in biblical scholarship. But the idea is actually as old as the Bible itself. Biblical writers refer with technical precision to such genres as song, lament, history, gospel, proverb, apocalypse, and many more. Furthermore, the writings that these writers produced show their awareness of style and technique. One writer, moreover, presents a theory of the author as self-conscious artist that applies to the entire Bible: the writer of Ecclesiastes describes himself as "weighing and studying and arranging many proverbs with great care," and as an author who "sought to find pleasing words " (Eccl. 12:9-10).
Three main impulses come together in the writings that make up the Bible - the historical, the theological, and the literary. These three intermingle, but usually passages are dominated by one of them. In other words, while much of the Bible is predominantly literary in nature, literary features can be discerned throughout the entire Bible.
To speak of the Bible as literature implies that there are qualities of discourse that make a text literary, different from nonliterary texts. Current thinking about the Bible as literature applies the ordinary criteria of literature to the Bible. While the exploration of these features of the Bible can be conducted by placing the Bible into its original, ancient literary context, to speak of the Bible as literature usually means discussing the Bible in terms of the familiar literary criteria of English and American literature. When we make such application, four qualities stand out.
(1) The subject of literature is human experience concretely portrayed. Literature does not primarily express ideas or propositions but aims instead to re-create the very nature of human experiences and external reality. Instead of stating propositions about virtue and vice, for example, literature presents stories of good and evil characters in action. The command "you shall not murder" asserts truth by means of propositional statement; the story of Cain's murder of Abel is a literary embodiment of the same principle.
The type of truth that literature is particularly adept at conveying is therefore truthful ness to human experience. Accordingly, an appreciation of the literary nature of the Bible and a literary approach to it begins with an acknowledgement of the prevalence of recognizable human experience in it. The Bible is not only or even primarily a book of ideas. It is a portrayal of life as people live it. To read the Bible as literature is first of all to relive a biblical text as vividly and experientially as possible.
The literary parts of the Bible possess a universal quality, based on the fact that while history tells us what happened, literature tells us what happens. (The Bible tells us both.) Because writers of literature aim to convey to us the very quality of experiences, there is a certain irreducible quality to what they have written, so that a propositional summary of a text never does justice to the literary re-creation of an experience that the author intends.
(2) A second quality of literature is artistry of expression. Literature is self-consciously crafted. Writers and readers of literature are interested not only in what is said but also in how it is said. The key ingredients of artistic form have traditionally included unity, pattern or design, theme or central focus, unity-in-variety (or theme and variation), coherence, balance, contrast, symmetry, repetition or recurrence, and unified progression. It is the artistic impulse that leads biblical poets to balance their statements in parallel lines and to structure their poems skillfully. A love of artistry leads biblical storytellers to construct shapely plots, to choose telling details that make characters and settings come alive, and to infuse such things as dramatic irony and poetic justice into their stories. Biblical proverbs possess the qualities of conciseness and memorability.
(3) Literature is definable by certain types of writing that people through the centuries have agreed are literary genres. The Bible is mainly a literary book because literary genres make up by far the largest share of the Bible. All genres have their distinctive features and conventions, and to read the Bible as literature partly means applying the correct generic considerations to biblical texts. The two dominant genres are narrative and poetry, and together these comprise at least 75 percent of the Bible.
Narrative is the primary form of the Bible, characterized by the plot pattern of beginning, middle, and end organizing the details. A host of narrative subgenres make up the bulk of the Bible: story of origins, hero story, epic, comedy, tragedy, gospel, parable. The historical narratives of the Bible become literary (as opposed to expository or merely informational) to the degree to which they recount not only what happened but also how it happened and to the degree to which they fall into the narrative genres noted above.
Biblical poetry is differentiated by two chief features. One, poets write in a poetic idiom, consisting chiefly of image, metaphor, simile, hyperbole, personification, apostrophe, and paradox. Second, poetry is written in a verse form, which in the Bible is parallelism - saying something in varied but similar form in two or more consecutive lines.
Most poems are lyric poems - short poems expressing the thoughts or feelings of a speaker. Within that umbrella, numerous specific lyric forms appear in the Bible, including (but not limited to) lament poem, praise psalm, nature poem, psalm of worship, love poem, epithalamion (wedding poem), and Christ hymn. In addition to lyric poems, vast parts of the prophetic books are poetic in form.
A number of additional literary genres make up the remaining 25 percent of the Bible. These include drama, oratory, proverb, satire (an attack on human vice or folly), epistle, and visionary writing.
(4) A fourth trait of literature is the presence of special resources of language. Even if the genre of a passage is not literary, the prevalence of literary features of style requires literary analysis. The most obvious of these resources is figurative language, including metaphor, simile, symbolism, connotative language, allusion, pun, paradox, irony, and wordplay. Such language is of course the very essence of poetry, but it appears throughout the Bible, in narratives and even in parts that might be considered predominantly expository rather than literary, such as the discourses of Jesus and the epistles.
In addition to possessing literary features of vocabulary, a text can become literary by its arrangement of sentences or rhetorical patterning. Any arrangement of clauses that strikes us as unusually patterned might qualify as an example of literary rhetoric - series of questions or statements that follow a common pattern, rhetorical questions, imaginary dialogues, and (especially important in the Bible) a terseness that produces an aphoristic quality. In other words, style is one of the things that makes the Bible literary. Biblical writers frequently manipulate the resources of language, syntax, and rhetoric to produce a literary effect.
To sum up, in format the Bible resembles an anthology of English and American literature more than anything else. It is a kaleidoscope of literary genres. Virtually every part of the Bible invites stylistic analysis. Artistry of expression is everywhere evident, as is the experiential concreteness embodying the authentic voice of human experience as it is known in all places and times.
FOR FURTHER READING
LELAND RYKEN