The Bible as Literature
THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE
Leland Ryken
Christianity is the most literary religion in the world. This should not surprise us, for the sacred book of Christianity is a thoroughly literary book.
This is a truth that the world of biblical scholarship has rediscovered in the last quarter of the twentieth century, as a quiet revolution has occurred in approaches to the Bible. Conventional preoccupations with historical background, theological content, and the process of composition have given way to a focus on the biblical text itself, a preoccupation with the forms and style of biblical writing, and a concern to see the unity and wholeness of texts.
A genuinely literary approach to the Bible can take two directions. One is to relate the Bible to the literary milieu in which it was produced. This is the domain of biblical scholars and experts in comparative literature of the ancient world, and it is the subject of a companion essay to this one in the present volume. Scholars in this camp tend to be preoccupied with identifying sources for what we find in the Bible.
What is known as the literary approach to the Bible more customarily involves placing the Bible into the familiar literary context that people pick up during the course of their literary education in high school and college. This means applying to the Bible the familiar tools of literary analysis that literary critics and teachers of literature use, and it involves comparing the Bible to familiar literary texts from Homer to modern drama and movies.
Such a literary approach is the subject of the present essay. It is relatively uninterested in accounting for sources of biblical literature. It is concerned simply to show what is in the Bible, not to speculate how it got there. It is not surprising that literary criticism of this type should see a great deal of correspondence between the Bible and other literature, for the simple reason that the Bible has been the single biggest influence on Western literature.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF “THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE”
The current fashionableness of the Bible-as-literature movement may convey the misconception that literary critics have discovered something new. But a look at the history of the topic shows that viewing the Bible as literature is as old as the Bible itself.
Literary Awareness of Biblical Writers
The biblical data consists of both explicit and implicit evidence. One writer within the canon comes right out and states his philosophy of writing, and it turns out to be a thoroughly literary view of composition. The passage occurs near the end of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes:
Besides being wise, the Preacher also taught the people knowledge, weighing and studying and arranging proverbs with great care. The Preacher sought to find pleasing words, and uprightly he wrote words of truth. (Eccl. 12:9-10, RSV)
Several things are important here. One is the picture of the writer as self-conscious composer, carefully choosing from among available options as he selects and arranges his material. A second theme is the preoccupation with artistry and beauty of expression, as suggested by the phrase “pleasing words” or “words of delight.” A third literary aspect of this writer’s theory of writing is his awareness that he is writing in a definite literary genre (“type” or “kind”), in this case by using proverbs.
A second piece of explicit evidence that the writers of the Bible were self-conscious literary craftsmen is the way in which they apply technical generic labels to works in the Bible. They talk about such genres as chronicle, saying or proverb, song, hymn, complaint, parable, gospel, apocalypse, epistle, and prophecy. What this shows is a relatively sophisticated knowledge of literary genres.
The implicit evidence of literary awareness among biblical writers is even more compelling. For one thing, biblical writings display literary qualities. Biblical storytellers evidently knew that stories are structured on a principle of beginning-middle-end. Their stories exhibit the same techniques of dramatic irony, foreshadowing, and climax that we find everywhere in the stories of the world.
Biblical poets knew that praise psalms have three main parts (introduction, development, resolution) and that lament psalms have five ingredients (invocation, complaint or definition of the crisis, petition, statement of confidence in God, and vow to praise God). They were adept at discovering metaphors and similes and at employing such figurative devices as personification, apostrophe, and hyperbole.
The literary sophistication of biblical writers is evident simply in the excellence with which they exploited the resources of literary art, but the case is strengthened if we place their writings in their ancient context. When we do so, we find that biblical writers wrote in apparent awareness of the literature being produced in surrounding nations. The Ten Commandments and book of Deuteronomy, for example, bear all the marks of the suzerainty treaty of ancient Hittite kings. Psalm 29 is a parody of Canaanite poems written about the exploits of Baal. The Song of Solomon contains poems resembling Egyptian love poetry. And the book of Acts contains elements of similarity to travelogues and trial defenses in Greek literature.
The Debate in the Early Church
The question of whether the Bible is literary became a point of debate among the church fathers. Steeped in classical rhetoric as well as the Bible, these men struggled to know how to relate the Bible to the rules and practice of classical writing. Their general tendency was to set up an opposition between the Bible and classical literature, and to celebrate the superiority of Christianity to paganism by arguing that the simplicity of the Bible triumphed over the ornateness of classical art.
But a few people took issue with this dismissal of the literary nature of the Bible. Some of them, for example, claimed that certain Old Testament poetic passages were written in identifiable classical meters. Jerome defended his own habit of alluding to classical authors by observing that Paul did the same in the New Testament.
But the towering medieval figure is Augustine (see especially On Christian Doctrine, IV, 6-7). Augustine’s approach is admittedly narrow (an analysis of rhetoric or style), but he established four crucial principles that are still valid in literary approaches to the Bible. First, he asserted that the writers of the Bible followed the ordinary rules of classical rhetoric. He explicated passages from Amos and the Epistles to prove that the Bible can be compared to familiar literature. Secondly, Augustine admired the eloquence and beauty of the Bible as having inherent value. Thirdly, he foreshadowed a cornerstone of modern literary theory when he claimed that the style of the Bible is inseparable from the message that it expresses. Finally, for all his enthusiasm over the literary eloquence of the Bible, Augustine showed an uneasiness about viewing the Bible as being totally similar to other literature, claiming, for example, that the eloquence of the Bible was not “composed by man’s art and care” but instead flowed “from the Divine mind.”
The Renaissance and Reformation Synthesis
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represented a great flowering of the literary understanding of the Bible. Whereas Augustine had voiced a minority opinion, viewing the Bible as literary became the majority opinion during the Renaissance. While Augustine’s approach was a narrowly focused rhetorical one, the Renaissance and Reformation championed a many-sided literary inquiry into both the content and form of the Bible. Further synthesis emerges when we observe that the attempt to view the Bible as literature was conducted by both exegetes (Luther, Calvin, and the Puritans) and writers of imaginative literature.
Among literary figures, much of the impetus for seeing the Bible as literature originally came from the attempt to provide a Christian defense of imaginative literature. Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry is a typical example. In defending literature, Sidney appealed to the concreteness or “figuring forth” of human experience in the Bible, as well as emphasizing the importance of literary genres and figurative language in the Bible.
Barbara Lewalski’s book Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric documents the extent to which Reformation exegetes and Renaissance poets agreed on a set of postulates about the literary nature of the Bible. The chief principles were that the Bible is made up of literary genres, that the texture of the Bible is frequently figurative and poetic, and that the Bible relies heavily on a system of symbolism. The noteworthy point is that the literary interpretation of the Bible went hand in hand with a religious belief in the Bible as a sacred book.
The Romantic Secularizing of the Bible
Such a synthesis was lost during the next great era of literary interest in the Bible—the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century. I have labelled the Romantic approach to the Bible as “secular” because it represented a literary interest devoid of the religious faith that centuries of Christianity had attributed to the Bible. In many ways the Romantic veneration of the Bible as literature was a poet’s movement.
The Romantics valued two literary aspects of the Bible. They loved the primitive simplicity of the biblical world and the passionate sublimity of much of its poetry. C. S. Lewis speaks of the era’s “taste for the primitive and the passionate,” adding the following:
The primitive simplicity of a world in which kings could be shepherds, the abrupt and mysterious manner of the prophets, the violent passions of bronze-age fighting men, the background of tents and flocks and desert and mountain, the village homeliness of our Lord’s parables and metaphors, now first . . . became a positive literary asset. (The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version, 27)
As Western society itself became increasingly secular, poets strove to put spiritual reality back into life. Hungry for mythology, they came to look upon the Bible as containing (in the words of the English poet William Blake) “the great code of art.” Romantic poets were interested in the Bible as a literary source and model, but not as a source of religious belief. The truth that Romanticists saw in the Bible was the truth that they found in other works of imaginative literature—truthfulness to human experience, especially human feelings. The secular valuing of the Bible as literature has persisted into the twentieth century, a phenomenon that has produced its own reaction in Christian circles that value the Bible chiefly for its religious content.
The Triumph of Literary Criticism of the Bible
The current interest in literary approaches to the Bible is largely the result of efforts by literary critics. During the first half of the twentieth century the movement was little noticed. A handful of college literature teachers taught successful courses in the English Bible at universities, and occasionally they published books of literary appreciation of the Bible and anthologies intended for use in literature courses.
By 1960 the movement had come to the surface. The most influential literary critic of the century, Northrop Frye, claimed that “the Bible forms the lowest stratum in the teaching of literature. It should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind, where everything that comes along later can settle on it” (The Educated Imagination, 110). By 1990 the Bible had become the latest fad in secular literary circles.
Biblical scholarship shares the current interest in literary approaches. A paradigm shift has occurred in which the theological and historical preoccupations of traditional biblical scholarship have given way to literary methods of analysis. Attempts to find the roots of this paradigm shift in earlier schools of biblical scholarship are misleading. The current literary interest in the Bible among biblical scholars became possible only as scholars repudiated the methods and preoccupations that had dominated their discipline for more than a century, in deference to the methods of literary critics in the humanities.
Summary
The willingness to approach the Bible with literary expectations and to analyze it with the tools of literary criticism is more than the latest fashion. It is rooted in the nature of the Bible itself. Beyond that, throughout the centuries the best interpretation of the Bible has accepted the premise that the Bible is in significant ways a work of literature whose meaning and enjoyment depend partly on an ability to approach it with literary methods.
PREMISES OF A LITERARY APPROACH TO THE BIBLE
Any exploration of what it means to approach the Bible as literature is based on presuppositions. Failure to acknowledge these presuppositions has often obscured the issues.
Obstacles to Acceptance of a Literary Approach
A literary approach to the Bible has always faced a challenge from people who have religious scruples over viewing the Bible as literature. Upon analysis, these scruples turn out to be groundless.
One objection centers on the equation of literature with fiction. Although literary critics with secular or liberal leanings make it clear that they regard much of the Bible as fictional, these claims are not a necessary part of a literary approach. We should not overlook that historians and biblical scholars with secular and liberal leanings have been making the claim of fictionality for decades. The question of whether the Bible is historically factual and accurate belongs not to literary criticism (which has nothing new to add to the discussion) but to the debate over historicity that has long raged among biblical scholars.
The fear that a literary approach to the Bible requires an acceptance of the fictionality of biblical narrative is based on a misconception about literature. Fictionality, though common in literature, is not an essential feature of it. The properties that make a text literary are unaffected by the historicity or fictionality of the material. A literary approach depends on a writer’s selectivity and molding of the material, regardless of whether the details actually happened or are made up.
Nor does the presence of artifice and convention in a biblical text imply fictionality. By way of analogy, the genre of the live television sports report is replete with conventions and artifice that do not not detract from its factuality. The reporter is filmed with a sports arena in the background. During the course of the report the reporter either interviews an athlete or is momentarily replaced by a film clip of sports action. The artifice of such conventions is obvious. Yet they do not undermine the factuality of the report itself.
Yet another obstacle to a literary approach to the Bible is a fear that such an approach means only a literary approach, without the special religious belief and authority that Christians associate with the Bible. Because the Bible is a special book, some people have argued that it cannot be like ordinary literature. By such logic, the Bible cannot be studied with the ordinary tools of linguistics, grammar, or history, a position that no one would argue.
The fact that the Bible is in some ways unlike other books does not mean that it is unlike them in every way. Even a cursory look at the Bible shows that it uses ordinary language and grammar, and that it contains history. It is equally evident that the Bible employs the techniques of literature that we find in literature generally.
To approach the Bible as literature does not mean that we read it only as literature. A literary approach itself can be trusted to reveal the points at which the Bible is like and unlike the familiar literature that we find in an anthology of English or American literature.
The Uniqueness of the Bible
A literary approach to the Bible by definition emphasizes how the Bible resembles other works of literature. Since this will be the focus of my own discussion, it is well to note first the most obvious ways in which the Bible is unlike such literature.
The God-centeredness and supernatural orientation of the Bible make it stand out. God is the leading character or actor in the Bible in a way that is without parallel in other literature. Furthermore, although ancient literature presupposes the existence of a supernatural world with otherworldly scenes and characters, the Bible is more consistent in portraying the interpenetration of a divine world into the ordinary realm of earthly life.
Secondly, the Bible makes stronger claims to inspiration and authority than ordinary literature does. Erich Auerbach, in his classic essay, “Odysseus’ Scar,” comparing storytelling technique in Homer’s Odyssey and Genesis, emphasized this difference. He wrote that “the religious intent” of stories in the Bible “involves an absolute claim to historical truth. . . . The Bible’s claim to truth is not only far more urgent than Homer’s, it is tyrannical—it excludes all other claims” (14). Another literary scholar, C. S. Lewis, made a similar observation:
In most parts of the Bible everything is implicitly or explicitly introduced with “Thus saith the Lord.” It is . . . not merely a sacred book but a book so remorselessly and continuously sacred that it does not invite, it excludes or repels, the merely aesthetic approach. (The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version, 32-33)
Thirdly, the Bible is a unique mingling of three types of writing. They are the historical, the theological, and the literary. Usually one of these dominates a passage, though not to the exclusion of the others. The more literary the treatment of an event is, the more a literary approach will yield. But even in these cases, biblical passages invite historical and theological approaches as well as a literary approach in a way that literature in general does not. Obviously, then, the plea for literary criticism of the Bible does not imply the sufficiency of such an approach by itself.
The Literary Unity of the Two Testaments
The tendency of literary and biblical scholars has been to drive a wedge between the literature of the Old and New Testaments. The fashion has been to treat the literary forms of the two testaments as distinct from each other, and the overwhelming result has been to value Old Testament literature to the disparagement of the New Testament.
The rigid distinction between the literary forms of the two testaments is a fallacy. It is partly the generic labels that mislead us. Because the Old Testament advertises such genres as chronicles, psalms, and prophets, it is easy to assume that the New Testament labels of gospels, acts, epistles, and apocalypse belong to a different world.
But underlying the books of the Old and New Testaments are literary forms that cut across the external labels. These literary forms are the deep structure of biblical literature, and they are what make the Bible literary in nature. They also provide a literary unity to the Bible as a whole that is obscured by conventional classifications. These foundational literary forms are story or narrative, poetry, proverb, satire, oration, and visionary writing. Narrative and poetry, of course, have numerous subtypes. Most basic of all is the concept that literature itself has identifiable characteristics.
In the discussion that follows, I have used the deep structure as my organizing framework. Whether we find a story or poem in the Old Testament or the New does not make much difference so far as its literary form and meaning are concerned. A story is a story, and a poem is a poem. What changes from the Old Testament to the New is not the literary forms (except for the addition of the epistle) but the theological content that those forms carry.
Summary
A literary approach to the Bible is compatible with virtually any theological or religious stance. It does not require acceptance of premises that are hostile to an evangelical understanding of the Bible. Although a literary approach by definition involves seeing the Bible as similar to literature in general, such comparison can be trusted to show ways in which the Bible is also unique.
To approach the Bible as literature requires two activities. One is to know what it means to approach the Bible as literature. The other is to define the “canon” of biblical literature—to know where literature appears in the Bible. These two topics—the methods of literary analysis and the places in the Bible where those methods are required—will provide the focus for the discussion that follows.
LITERATURE AS A GENRE
Before we consider the specific genres of biblical literature, it is necessary to define literature itself. When we do, we find that literature as a whole is a genre—a type of writing that has its own identifiying traits. Before a piece of writing is a story or poem or any other specific genre, it belongs to the larger category of “literature.”
Human Experience as the Subject
The simplest of all touchstones for literature is that the subject of literature is human experience, in contrast to abstract facts or information. Literature aims to get the reader to share an experience, not primarily to grasp ideas.
Literature is “incarnational.” It embodies its ideas or meanings in concrete form. It enacts rather than states. Instead of expressing abstract propositions about virtue and vice, for example, literature presents stories of good and evil characters in action. The commandment “you shall not murder” gives us a precept; literature incarnates the same truth in the story of Cain and Abel. Instead of defining “neighbor,” Jesus told a story about neighborly behavior (the parable of the Good Samaritan). The truthfulness of literature is not simply a matter of true ideas but also takes the form of truthfulness to human experience—to the way things are in the world.
Literature thus appeals to the imagination—our image-making and image-perceiving capacity. In terms popularized by recent brain research, it is “right-brain” discourse. The corresponding skill that it requires from a reader or interpreter of the Bible is the ability to picture scenes, characters, and events. Literature appeals to our intelligence through the imagination.
Because literature is incarnational, the first thing it requires of a reader is a willingness to relive the text as vividly and concretely as possible—sharing scenes and events with characters in a story or the images in a poet’s meditation. Furthermore, a piece of literature cannot be reduced to an idea or proposition. The whole story or whole poem is the meaning because it is an experience, not an abstraction.
Because the truthfulness of literature is partly truthfulness to human experience, literature is universal. Whereas history tells us what happened, literature tells us what happens—what is true for all people at all times. Of course, in the Bible these two impulses are typically combined. Still, the degree to which we can see universal human experience in a text remains a useful touchstone of whether it is literary in nature.
Literary Genres
The most common way by which literature has been defined through the centuries is by its genres (literary types). The human race has generally agreed that some genres (such as story, poetry, and drama) are literary in nature. Other genres, such as historical chronicles, theological treatises, and genealogies, are expository (“informational”) writing. Still others fall into one category or the other, depending on how a writer handles them. Letters, sermons, and orations, for example, can move in the direction of literature if they display the ordinary elements of literature.
Every literary genre has its distinctive features and conventions. These are a set of expectations that should govern our encounter with a text, enabling us to ask the right questions of a passage. An awareness of genre can program our reading of a passage, giving it a familiar shape and allowing the details to fall into an identifiable pattern. Knowing how a given genre operates can also prevent misinterpretation of a text.
Even if we did not have other evidence, we would know that the Bible is literary simply by its abundance of literary genres. The list of genres is approximately what we find in an anthology of world literature: epic, story of origins, hero story, tragedy, drama, satire, lyric poetry, epithalamion (wedding poem), elegy (funeral poem), encomium (a poem or essay in praise of an abstract quality or character type), proverb, parable, visionary writing, epistle, and oratory.
Special Resources of Language
Regardless of the specific genre in which a literary text is written, literature uses a higher proportion of certain resources of language than ordinary discourse does. The most obvious of these resources is figurative language, including metaphor, simile, symbolism, connotative language, allusion, pun, paradox, irony, and word play. Such language is of course the very essence of poetry, but it appears throughout the Bible, even in parts that might be considered predominantly expository rather than literary, such as the New Testament Epistles.
In addition to possessing such features of vocabulary, a text can become literary by its arrangement of sentences or rhetorical patterning. An example is the parallel clauses that make up the verse form of biblical poetry but are also evident in much biblical prose. 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, question-and-answer constructions, imaginary dialogues, and (very important in the Bible) the conciseness of a proverb.
All of this is a way of saying that style is one of the things that makes the Bible literary. Whenever writers do things with language that call attention to the expression itself and that get more mileage out of language than ordinary discourse does, the resulting style lends a literary quality to a passage. Biblical writers consistently manipulate the literary resources of language, syntax, and rhetoric.
Artistry
Literature is an art form, characterized by beauty, craftsmanship, and technique. The “how” of literature is as important as the “what.”
The elements of artistic form that all types of literature share include pattern or design, theme or central focus, organic unity (also called unity in variety, or theme and variation), coherence, balance, contrast, symmetry, repetition or recurrence, variation, and unified progression. These elements of artistry take one form in narrative, another in poetry, another in proverb, and so forth. But whatever the genre, the sheer abundance of literary technique and artistry that we find in many parts of the Bible make it a literary masterpiece.
Artistic form serves the purpose of intensifying the impact of what is said, but it also provides pleasure, delight, and enjoyment. One of the things that a literary approach to the Bible offers over conventional approaches is that it opens the way for readers to enjoy the aesthetic beauty of the Bible. Literary analysis is capable of showing that the Bible is an interesting book rather than a dull book. The artistic excellence of the Bible is not extraneous to its total effect. It is one of the glories of the Bible.
Meaning through Form
A literary approach is preoccupied with literary form. In any discourse, meaning is communicated through form. The concept of form should be construed very broadly in this context. It includes anything that touches on how a writer has expressed the content of an utterance.
While the principle of meaning through form is true for all types of writing, it is especially crucial for literature. Literature has its own forms and techniques, and these tend to be more complex and subtle and indirect than those of ordinary discourse. Stories, for example, communicate their meaning through character, setting, and action. To understand a story, we must first interact with the form, that is, the characters, settings, and events. Poetry conveys its meanings through figurative language and concrete images. It is therefore impossible to determine what a poem says without first encountering the form, that is, the poetic language.
The literary critic’s preoccupation with the how of biblical writing is not frivolous. It is evidence of an artistic delight in verbal beauty and craftsmanship, but it is also part of an attempt to understand what the Bible says. In a literary text it is impossible to separate what is said (content) from how it is said (form).
Summary
A literary approach to the Bible begins with an awareness of what things make a text literary. The defining features of literature include the concrete presentation of human experience, the presence of literary genres as the form that embodies the meaning, the use of literary resources of language, and the prevalence of artistry.
From what I have said, it is obvious that a literary approach challenges many of the tendencies in traditional biblical scholarship. The emphasis on the unity of a text resists the atomistic analysis found in biblical commentaries and the patchwork that results when scholars undertake excavations into the stages of composition that lie behind a finished text. The premise of literary criticism that literature is a concrete embodiment of human experience takes issue with reducing the Bible to a theological outline with proof texts attached.
The focus on literary technique presupposes self-conscious composition on the part of the human writers, in contrast to theories of divine dictation or the impersonal evolution of texts through various stages of transmission. And the emphasis on variety of literary genres in the Bible challenges a common operating premise that the Bible consists of all one type of material.
By the criteria that I have outlined, how much of the Bible is literary? Eighty percent is not an exaggeration, and even in the predominantly expository parts of the Bible literary techniques appear on virtually every page.
BIBLICAL NARRATIVE
Narrative is the dominant form of the Bible. Above all else, the Bible is a series of events, with many interspersed passages that interpret the meaning of the events. The overall shape of the Bible, moreover, follows the beginning-middle-end pattern of a story. The central character in the Bible’s story is God, and the story itself is what biblical scholars call “salvation history”—the story of God’s acts of creation, providence, judgment, and redemption.
How Stories Work
Stories are comprised of three basic elements—setting, character, and plot. Together these yield themes—insights into life that can be stated as propositions.
Settings are physical, temporal, and cultural. They serve two main functions in stories. They are always part of the action, providing a fit container for the actions and characters and allowing the story to come alive in a reader’s imagination. Often a setting takes on symbolic importance as well, becoming part of the meaning of a story. In the story of Lot, for example, Sodom is a moral monstrosity as well as a place, and God’s turning the city into a wasteland is itself the meaning of the story (God’s judgment against sin).
Characters in stories are known to us in a variety of ways: by what the storyteller says about them, by other characters’ responses to them, by their words and thoughts, by what they say about themselves, and above all by their actions. Whatever the means of portrayal, a reader’s goal should be to get to know the characters in a biblical story as fully as possible.
It is an understood premise of narrative that characters in a story are in some sense universal. They are representative of humanity generally and carry a burden of meaning larger than themselves. On the basis of what happened to them, Bible readers can draw conclusions about people in general.
Plot or action is the backbone of a story. Stories are built around one or more plot conflicts, which can be physical conflict, conflict between people, or moral/spiritual conflict. A plot conflict has a beginning, a discernible development, and a final resolution. This is the essential, inevitable way in which stories are structured, and according to which they must be analyzed.
In the ongoing progression of the plot conflict(s), a reader goes through the action with a central character known as the protagonist. Arrayed against him or her are the antagonists. Common narrative strategies are to show the protagonist in situations of testing and situations that require choice. A discrepancy between what readers know to be true and ignorance on the part of characters in a story is known as irony.
As one moves from story to meaning, the simplest rule of interpretation is that every story is in some sense an example story. We therefore need to determine what it is an example of. It is also an understood convention of literary narrative that the world a storyteller creates by the selectivity of details is a picture of the world as the writer understands it, and of what is right and wrong in that world. It is also important to be aware that storytelling is an affective art: it conveys much of its meaning by getting a reader to feel positively or negatively toward characters and events.
The general features of stories that I have noted are the minimal terms for analyzing the stories of the Bible. But the Bible also contains an abundance of specific narrative subtypes, each with its own set of additional conventions.
The Story of Origins
The first story in the Bible, Genesis 1–3, belongs to an important genre of ancient literature known as the story of origins. It is a three-part story.
Genesis 1 is the Bible’s creation story. It has only one chief character, God. The story itself is a catalog of God’s mighty acts of creation, and it is replete with elements of repetition, balance, and progression.
Genesis 2 narrows the focus from the universe to human life in the Garden of Eden. The unifying motif is God’s provisions for human life. It is a picture of how God intended human life to be lived—anytime, anywhere.
Genesis 3 tells about the origin of evil in human experience and the world. The story combines several common narrative types: temptation, fall from innocence, crime and punishment, and initiation (into evil and its consequences). The psychology of guilt is also prominent.
Hero Stories
Biblical narrative is almost synonymous with the genre “hero story.” Hero stories are built around the life and exploits of a protagonist or hero. They spring from one of the most basic literary impulses—the desire to embody the values and typical struggles of a society in the life of a representative and exemplary figure. The main interest of hero stories is the hero’s qualities and destiny.
The hero stories of the Bible begin in Genesis (“the book of beginnings”). Noah is a hero of righteousness in an evil age. He is God’s agent of rescue and the father of a new world (Gen. 6–9). One of the longest hero stories in the Bible is the story of the patriarch Abraham (Gen. 12–25). Abraham is both a domestic hero and a spiritual hero of faith in God. His domestic heroism is seen in his quest for a son and in his typical roles (husband, uncle, father, head of a household, and owner of possessions). His spiritual heroism is evident in his obedience to God’s call to leave his homeland to become a wanderer, in his faith in God’s promise to give him a son, and in his willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac.
Two other heroes complete the images of heroism in the book of Genesis. Jacob is largely unidealized in the story devoted to him (Gen. 25–35), but his life is heroic because it shows how God can work with unpromising material, eventually transforming even a deeply flawed personality. The story of Joseph (Gen. 37–50) is the first example of a significant biblical archetype known as the suffering servant. Heroes who belong to this pattern undergo undeserved suffering and as a result bring about good for other people.
Later Old Testament stories continue the pattern of stories built around the life or acts of a hero. David is one of the most complex heroes in all of literature, both in his roles and personal qualities. His story as a successful warrior and king is the closest parallel in the Bible to the hero stories of ancient literature outside the Bible. Another story of military heroism is the story of Gideon (Judg. 6–8). The story of Daniel presents a nationalistic hero, a hero of integrity and political ability, and a religious hero of uncompromising faith in God. The stories of Elijah (1 Kings 16–21; 2 Kings 1–2) and Elisha (2 Kings 2–9) capture another prominent Old Testament character type, the prophet of God.
Stories built around heroines are few but striking. The book of Ruth is a love story that celebrates Ruth’s domestic and religious heroism. Another masterpiece of biblical narrative is the story of Esther, which portrays the courage of a national and religious heroine. The story of the Israelites’ conquest of Sisera’s forces (Judg. 4–5) recounts the heroic explots of two women, Deborah and Jael.
The incidence of hero stories continues unabated in the New Testament. The Gospels are hero stories on a grand scale. They are a pure example of narrative built around the life of an exemplary protagonist whose acts and words are treasured and celebrated. The same thing can be said of the book of Revelation, which rightly advertises at the very outset that it will be an unveiling of Jesus Christ in his conquest. And the book of Acts is a small anthology of hero stories, chiefly about Peter and Paul.
This brief survey of hero stories in the Bible shows how widespread the heroic impulse is in the Bible, and how varied its heroic ideal is.
Epic
Epic is a species within the class of heroic narrative. It is a long narrative of national destiny. Common epic motifs include warfare, conquest, dominion, and kingdom. Supernatural settings, characters, and events have always been a hallmark of epic. Epics are built around a central epic feat performed by the epic hero, a feat that usually involves military conquest.
The most obviously epic work in the Bible is the epic of the Exodus, which spans the narrative portions of Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. It is built around the epic feat of the Exodus from the land of slavery to the Promised Land. Like other epics, it narrates a decisive moment in national history and is a definitive repository of the religious, moral, and political ideals of the society that produced it.
The Old Testament historical chronicles are also epiclike. They have a national scope and follow the familiar epic motifs of battle, conquest, and dominion. Their heroes are public figures. And the continuous presence of the idea of the covenant lends these stories the epic quality of national and racial destiny that makes them more than simply hero stories.
The epic impulse is also present in the New Testament. The Gospels are so expansive and momentous that they have the world-changing atmosphere of epics. The book of Acts, with its focus on Paul’s journeys and quests, recounts bigger-than-life events and the epoch-making story of the early church’s expansion over vast geographic stretches. And the book of Revelation is a spiritualized version of virtually every epic motif and stylistic trait that we might name.
Tragedy
Literary tragedy is the spectacle of exceptional calamity. It depicts a movement from prosperity to catastrophe. The focus of tragedy is on the tragic hero—a great person of high social standing who in a moment of tragic choice displays a tragic flaw of character (Aristotle called it hamartia, the New Testament word translated as “sin”). The plot of tragedy highlights the element of human choice. This means that the hero is always responsible for the downfall, and in biblical tragedy the tragic hero is also deserving of the catastrophe. The tragic pattern consists of six elements that are remarkably constant: dilemma—choice—catastrophe—suffering—perception—death.
The prototypical biblical tragedy is the story of the fall in Genesis 3. Adam and Eve face the dilemma of whether to obey or disobey God’s prohibition. They make their tragic mistake, which leads to scenes of suffering and perception.
The masterpiece of biblical tragedy is the story of King Saul (1 Sam. 8–31). Saul’s tragedy is a tragedy of weak leadership. His dilemma consisted of his dual allegiance—toward obeying God and taking the path of expediency in order to please the people. The narrative and psychological center of the tragedy is Saul’s disobedience of God’s command to destroy the Amalekites (1 Sam. 15). It is followed by catastrophe, suffering, perception, and death.
There are other biblical tragedies as well. The story of Samson (Judg. 13–16) fits the tragic pattern exactly. The story of David as told in 1 and 2 Samuel follows the tragic pattern of initial prosperity followed by catastrophe and suffering. In typical tragic fashion, moreover, the hero’s downfall is localized in a specific event (the Bathsheba-Uriah debacle). Other brief narratives in the historical books of the Bible are tragic in outline, and some of Jesus’ parables are likewise depictions of wrong choices.
Although the spirit of tragedy pervades the Bible (not surprisingly, in a book so devoted to the portrayal of evil and its consequences), there are fewer full-fledged tragedies in the Bible than we might expect. The Bible is an anthology of tragedies averted—averted through the intervention of human repentance and divine forgiveness.
The Gospels
The New Testament Gospels are unique, but that uniqueness has more to do with their content and the nature of their protagonist than with their literary forms. At the level of narrative form, the Gospels are an expanded hero story. They consistently keep the focus on Jesus, and their obvious narrative purpose is to tell the story of the teaching and deeds of Jesus. The organizing principle is loosely (but not strictly) chronological, with virtually all of the space devoted to the three years of Jesus’ public ministry. More than a fourth of the content is devoted to the trial, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus. The plot of the story is not single but episodic.
The hero himself accounts for part of the uniqueness of these stories. He makes claims about himself that conventional heroes do not make—that he has power to forgive sins, that he will lay down his life for the salvation of his followers, that he will rise from the dead, that he is the light of the world. His deeds of power likewise transcend anything we find elsewhere in literature.
While the individual literary forms in the Gospels are not unique, the combination of forms that converge is without exact parallel. Equal space is given to what the hero said and what he did. Within the overall narrative framework, we find continous examples of such common genres as parable, drama or dialogue, sermon or oration, and saying or proverb. Narrative subtypes also abound: annunciation and nativity stories, calling or vocation stories, recognition stories, witness stories, encounter stories, conflict or controversy stories, pronouncement stories (in which a saying of Jesus is linked with an event that correlates with it), miracle stories, and passion stories.
Parables
The parables of Jesus loom large in most people’s thinking about biblical narrative. These parables are brief fictional stories that embody easily grasped ideas, usually dealing with some aspect of the kingdom of God. Even though a parable often exhibits a single main theme, it is not unusual for additional ideas to be part of the total meaning.
Parables are folk stories that obey the rules of popular storytelling through the centuries. These narrative ingredients include homespun realism, simplicity of action, suspense, foils (heightened contrasts), repetition (including threefold repetition), end stress, universal character types, and archetypes. Many of the parables include an element of unreality or exaggeration—a “crack” in the dominant realism that teases us into exploring what the stories communicate beyond the simple surface.
Parables are too simple to be meaningful only at the surface level. Their true meaning emerges when we view them as allegories—stories with a double meaning. Contrary to common scholarly lore, there are six impeccable reasons to believe that the parables were intended to be allegories or symbolic stories. One is the etymology of the word “parable,” which means “to throw alongside,” with the implication of double meaning. The very simplicity of the stories propels us to see a spiritual level of meaning in addition to the realistic surface. Many of the details in the parables carried traditional symbolic meanings (God as father or owner of a vineyeard, seed as God’s word, etc.). Unrealistic elements in the parables also signal a deeper level of meaning. Furthermore, the religious purpose of the parables emerges only when we start to attach second meanings to the details—when we understand that the seed that is sown is the gospel, for example, and the types of soils are various human responses. Finally, when Jesus interpreted two of his parables (Matthew 13:18-23, 36-43), he attached a corresponding allegorical meaning to virtually every detail in the stories.
A full treatment of a parable falls naturally into four stages of analysis. The process begins by interacting with the stories as literal stories, exploring the narrative ingredients of setting, character, and plot. The second step is to identify the allegorical or symbolic meanings of details that stand for something else. On the basis of this analysis it is possible to state the themes or ideas implicit in the parable. The final step is application—to the original audience and to a modern reader.
BIBLICAL POETRY
The second most prominent literary genre in the Bible is poetry. Poetry is identifiable by two primary features—verse form and the presence of a poetic idiom or style.
Parallelism
The verse form of biblical poetry is known as parallelism. It avoids rhyme and consists instead of thought couplets or triplets. Parallelism can be defined as two or more lines that express something in different words but similar grammatical form.
Four main types of parallelism make up biblical poetry. Synonymous parallelism expresses a thought more than once in similar grammatical form or sentence structure:
The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.1
In antithetical parallelism, the second line states the truth of the first in a negative or contrasting way:
For the Lord knows the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.2
In climactic parallelism, the second line completes the first by repeating part of it and then adding to it:
Ascribe to the Lord, O heavenly beings,
ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.3
Synthetic (“growing”) parallelism consists of a pair of lines that together form a complete unit and in which the second line completes or expands the thought of the first (but without repeating anything in the first line):
Thou preparest a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.4
Parallelism serves several purposes. It is part of the artistry of biblical poetry, conveying the impression of skillfully handled language. It is also a mnemonic device—an aid to memorization, recitation, or even improvisation in the originally oral composition. Parallelism produces a meditative effect, possessing a retarding element in which we turn the prism of thought or feeling in the light.
Poetic Idiom
Poets speak a language all their own. This poetic idiom is the heart of poetry; it is much more important than the verse form in which a poem is embodied.
Above all, poets think in images—words naming a sensory thing or action. Poetry avoids abstraction as much as possible, though in the biblical poetry the verse form of parallelism often leads a poet to combine the concrete with an abstract statement. Poetry requires a reader to experience a series of sensory experiences. Having experienced the image, we need to interpret it—its connotations, its relevance to the topic of the poem, its affective meanings, and whether it is positive or negative in meaning in the context of a given passage.
The next most pervasive element of poetry is comparison. It usually takes the form of either metaphor (an implied comparison) or simile (an explicit comparison that uses the formula “like” or “as”). Both metaphor and simile are based on the principle of correspondence. The very word “metaphor” implies this, for it is based on the Greek words meaning “to carry over.”
Metaphor and simile place a double obligation on a reader. One is to experience the literal level of the image. If the poet tells us that “the Lord God is a sun and shield” (Ps. 84:11), we must first experience the physical phenomena of sun and shield. Then we must proceed to the interpretive task of determining how God is like sun and shield. Metaphor and simile are based on a principle of transfer of meaning. They secure an effect on one level and then ask us to transfer those meanings (which are usually multiple) to another level—the level of the actual subject of the poem.
Several additional figures of speech round out the poet’s repertoire. Personification consists of treating something nonhuman (and frequently inanimate) as though it were a human capable of acting or responding. Hyperbole (conscious exaggeration for the sake of effect) does not express literal truth but emotional truth. Another standard way to express strong feeling is with apostrophe—addressing someone or something absent as though it were present and capable of listening. An allusion is a reference to past literature or history.
Lyric as the Basic Poetic Form
Because the Bible is filled with specific types of poems, it is important to note that the concept of “poem” is virtually synonymous with “lyric.” Virtually all of the poems in the Bible should be viewed as examples of the genus “lyric” before they are regarded as examples of a particular species.
A lyric poem is a brief poem, often intended to be sung, that expresses the thoughts and especially the feelings of a speaker. In other words, the identifying features of a lyric are three: lyrics are brief, personal or subjective (the speaker speaks in his or her own voice), and reflective or emotional.
Unified impact is important in a lyric, and the best way to see its presence is to employ the scheme of theme and variation, analyzing how a given unit contributes to the controlling theme. The overwhelming majority of lyrics are built on the principle of three-part structure: an opening statement of theme (the stimulus that moves the poet to sing), development of the theme, and concluding resolution. Lyric poets develop their theme by choosing from among four possibilities: repetition, the catalog or list, association (branching out from an initial idea to a related one), and contrast.
The Book of Psalms
The best known book of poetry in the Bible is the book of Psalms. It is an anthology of poems collected for use in worship at the temple in Jerusalem. All of the psalms are lyric poems, but a host of subtypes make considerations of genre especially important as a factor in a literary approach to the book of Psalms.
The most numerous category of Psalms is the lament or complaint. It is a fixed form that includes five elements that can appear in any order and that can occur more than once in a given psalm. The ingredients are an invocation or cry to God, the lament or complaint (a definition of the crisis), petition or supplication, a statement of confidence in God, and a vow to praise God.
The second largest category of Psalms is the praise psalm, which follows a three-part format. It begins with a call to praise, which can consist of as many as three ingredients—an exhortation to praise God, the naming of the person or group to whom the command is directed, and identifying the mode of praise (voice, harp, etc.). The development of the praise is usually built on the principle of a catalog of the praiseworthy acts or attributes of God, though occasionally the portrait technique appears. Praise psalms are rounded off with a note of finality, which often takes the form of a brief prayer or wish.
The basis of identifying additional subtypes within the book of Psalms is content rather than form. The dominant categories are nature poems, worship psalms (also called songs of Zion), penitential psalms, historical psalms, royal psalms, meditative psalms, psalms that praise a character type or abstract quality and are known by the label “encomium,” royal psalms, imprecatory psalms, and even an epithalamion (a wedding poem, Psalm 45).
The Song of Solomon
The Song of Solomon is a collection of love poems that together make up an exalted epithalamion (wedding poem) built around a single courtship and wedding. The poems are pastoral love poems in which the setting is rustic and the lovers are portrayed (at least partly fictionally) as shepherd and shepherdess. A collection of lyrics is not a way of telling a story. Instead the Song of Solomon portrays a series of feelings and moods, structured on a stream-of-consciousness principle.
Both the style and the specific genres of the Song of Solomon are familiar to love poetry both ancient and modern. The style is consciously artificial and highly senuous (“sensory”), metaphoric, hyperbolic, and passionate. Within the general framework of pastoral, specific genres include the invitation to love, praise of the beloved, emblematic blazons (lists of the features of the beloved, with each feature compared to an object in nature), courtship and wedding poems, and songs of separation, longing, and reunion.
New Testament Hymns
Lyric poems are also common in the New Testament. The nativity story (Luke 1–2) is sprinkled with nativity hymns. We can also find hymn fragments in the Epistles (e.g., Eph. 5:14, 2 Tim. 2:11-13, Heb. 1:3). Hymns of worship punctuate the visions of Revelation (e.g., 4:8, 11; 5:9-10). Three famous Christ hymns are especially noteworthy: John 1:1-18, Philippians 2:5-11, and Colossians 1:15-20.
Encomium
Spanning both Old and New Testaments is the encomium. While some biblical encomia are written in prose rather than poetry, they are lyric in effect and are usually so stylized that they can easily be printed in the form of Hebrew parallelism.
An encomium is a poem or essay written in praise of either an abstract quality or a generalized character type. Common motifs are an introduction to the subject of praise, the distinguished and ancient ancestry of that subject, a catalog or description of praiseworthy acts and qualities, the superior or indispensable nature of the subject, the rewards that accompany the things being praised, and a conclusion urging the reader to emulate the subject.
Biblical encomia that praise an abstract quality include poems in praise of wisdom in the book of Proverbs (3:13-20; 8), God’s law (Ps. 119), love (1 Cor. 13), and faith (Heb. 11). Encomia praising character types include Psalms 1, 15, 112, and 128 (the godly person) and Proverbs 31:10-31 (the virtuous wife). The Song of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53 is a parody of the genre, praising the suffering servant for unconventional reasons.
Additional Poetic Parts of the Bible
In addition to the repositories of poetry that I have noted, it is important to realize that poetry also appears in books of the Bible that we ordinarily assign to another genre as the primary form. The book of Job, a drama, is couched in poetry except for the prose narrative framework. Most of the Old Testament prophetic books are written in a predominantly poetic form. So is Old Testament wisdom literature—the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes (where even the prose passages are poetic in effect). Embedded in Old Testament stories we find such varied lyric forms as songs of deliverance (the Song of Moses in Exod. 15 and the Song of Deborah in Judg. 5) and an elegy (David’s elegy for Jonathan in 2 Sam. 1).
The New Testament is continuously poetic. Jesus is one of the world’s most famous poets. His discourses are imagistic, metaphoric, hyperbolic, impassioned, and filled with paradoxes. The movement of their clauses is replete with parallelism. The New Testament Epistles are only slightly less poetic. And the book of Revelation relies on the staples of poetry—image, symbol, and allusion.
OTHER LITERARY FORMS IN THE BIBLE
Biblical Drama
Although no book of the Bible was written for the stage, and although only one book is dramatic in form, the dramatic impulse pervades the Bible. The incidence of directly quoted speeches in the Bible is without parallel in ancient literature and unprecedented until we come to the modern novel. The dramatized scene built out of dialogue between characters in a definite setting is by far the most common mode of biblical narrative. Similarly, the prophetic books are cosmic dramas that take place on a world stage, and the book of Revelation is so filled with elaborately described scenes and dialogues that it is likely to have been influenced by the conventions of Greek drama.
The book of Job is the lone book of the Bible that is structured like a drama. The book poses a problem—why do the righteous suffer?—and then presents the speeches of characters as they debate possible solutions to the problem. Of course, the speeches are longer and more oratorical than we expect in modern drama. As in all drama, the focus of our attention is on character clashes, as Job variously argues with his visitors and with God. To read the dramatic book of Job looking primarily for action is to invite frustration. The pace is leisurely, as the speakers repeat a few common ideas. The poetic style invites us to luxuriate over how an idea is expressed, as we listen to everything at least twice.
The superstructure of this drama is at least threefold. One organizing principle is the hero’s quest for understanding and for union with God. A second point of unity is the obtuseness of the friends’ wrongheadedness, whose repetitious speeches serve as a static background against which we can measure the intellectual and spiritual progress of Job. A third unifying element in the drama is its irony. In the case of the friends, we witness the irony of orthodoxy—of belief in principles that are generally true but that do not fit the situation of Job. Balancing this is the irony of rebellion against God, as we observe Job make charges against God that we know from the prologue to be untrue.
Biblical Proverbs
The Bible is one of the most aphoristic or proverbial books in the world. It is filled with concise, memorable sayings from beginning to end.
The literary features of proverbs account for their power. Proverbs are concise and memorable. Their aim is to make an insight permanent. They are simultaneously simple (brief and easily grasped) and profound (dealing with the essential issues of life, and inexhaustible in their application). Often proverbs are both specific and universal: they cover a whole host of similar experiences, and they often use a particularized situation to stand for a broader principle of life (the statement that “in the place where [the tree] falls, there it will lie” [Eccl. 11:3, RSV] is really talking about the principle of finality that characterizes many events in life).
Proverbs are also frequently poetic in form, using the resources of imagery, metaphor, and simile. Some biblical proverbs are descriptive of what is, while others are prescriptive of what should be. The truthfulness of proverbs is truthfulness to human experience. Proverbs are continually being confirmed in our experiences and observations of life. They never go out of date.
Thus defined, the proverb as a literary form is pervasive in the Bible. The books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes consist wholly of collections of proverbs, sometimes arranged into proverb clusters on a common theme. But the parallelism of biblical poetry tends almost inevitably toward an aphoristic effect. Jesus’ discourses rely heavily on the proverb or saying as a basic element. The New Testament Epistles contain an abundance of aphorisms, and the book of James employs the techniques of wisdom literature throughout. Even the stories of the Bible have provided their share of proverbial sayings to the common storehouse of proverbs.
Satire
Satire is the exposure, through ridicule or rebuke, of human vice or folly. It consists of three essential elements: an object of attack, a satiric vehicle, and a satiric norm (the stated or implied standard by which the object of attack is criticized). The satiric vehicle is often a story but can be something as specific as a metaphor (as when Jesus calls the Pharisees whitewashed tombs). Satire is often, though not universally, accompanied by a comic or sarcastic tone.
The Bible is a much more satiric book than is commonly acknowledged. The satiric impulse is not confined to books that are mainly satiric. It is present in biblical narrative, for example, where wholly idealized characters are almost unknown and where the character flaws of most characters are satirically exposed. Satire is equally present in the Wisdom Literature, where many of the proverbs attack such human failings as greed, laziness, self-indulgence, and folly.
The largest quantity of satire is found in prophetic writing. The two major types of prophetic oracle are the oracle of salvation and the oracle of judgment. The best literary approach to the oracle of judgment is satire. These passages always have a discernible object of attack and a standard by which the judgment is rendered. The attack, moreover, is embodied in a wide range of literary forms, from the simple prediction of calamity to extended portraits of evil and judgment. A book like Amos is from start to finish a work of satire: it attacks public evils on the basis of clearly stated spiritual and moral standards by means of a kaleidoscopic variety of literary techniques.
Satire pervades the Gospels as well. In the story itself the opponents of Jesus, especially the Pharisees, are portrayed with satiric scorn. The discourses of Jesus are likewise frequently satiric (Matt. 23, for example, is a satiric discourse that attacks the Pharisees with a barrage of satiric devices). And many of the parables that Jesus told are typical satiric pieces that use narrative form to embody an attack on a specific attitude or behavior.
The great masterpiece of biblical satire is the Old Testament book of Jonah. The object of attack is the kind of nationalistic zeal that made God the exclusive property of Israel and refused to accept the universality of God’s grace. The protagonist of the story embodies the attitudes that the writer is holding up to satiric attack. The other main character in the story is God, whose universal love and mercy are the standard by which the attitudes of Jonah are exposed as wrong. The irony of the ignominious behavior of the wayward prophet produces latent humor in the story.
Epistle
The New Testament Epistles are modifications of the conventional letters of the classical world. Like Greek and Roman letters, the Epistles contain an opening (sender, addressee, greeting), a body, and a closing (greetings and final wishes). But two important additions appear in the New Testament Epistles—the thanksgiving (prayer for spiritual welfare and remembrance or commendation of the spiritual riches of the addressee) and the paraenesis (a list of exhortations, virtues, vices, commands, or proverbs). Whereas the content of ordinary letters in the ancient world might be virtually anything, the New Testament Epistles keep the focus on theological and moral issues.
At the level of style, the Epistles are continuously literary. Figurative language such as imagery, metaphor, and paradox is common. The sentences and clauses are often artfully arranged, with the influence of parallelism so prominent that many a passage could be arranged as a poem. Dramatic apostrophes, rhetorical questions, personifications, question-and-answer constructions, and anthitheses, though less frequent, are nonetheless common. The sheer exuberance of these letters produces its own grand style and is often lyric in effect. And, of course, there is the continuous presence of proverbs or aphorisms—striking statements that stay in the memory.
The Epistles are occasional writings, written in response to specific occasions in the life of the early churches. In a manner reminiscent of stories, they give a many-sided picture of everyday life. Because the authors are responding to specific situations that have arisen and questions that have been raised, the Epistles are not (except for the books of Romans, Ephesians, and Hebrews) systematic theological treatises. The points addressed are not necessarily the most important ones; they are simply the ones that have been raised.
Oratory
Biblical oratory consists of formal, stylized speeches addressed to a specific audience, usually on a noteworthy occasion. Usually the dignity of the occasion produces an elevated style. One whole book—Deuteronomy—is an oratory, being Moses’ farewell address to the nation of Israel.
The customary pattern is for orations to be embedded in other material. The Old Testament stories, for example, contain orations delivered in their narrative context—passages like Jacob’s blessing of his sons (Gen. 49), Samuel’s installation of Saul as king (1 Sam. 12), Solomon’s speech and prayer at the dedication of the temple (1 Kings 8), Ezra’s speech when the law was reinstituted (Neh. 9). The book of Job is a small collection of orations. The prophetic books frequently have an oratorical cast, whether the speaker is a prophet or God. And God’s giving of the law to Moses (Exod.—Num.) is oratorical in nature.
A similar pattern appears in the New Testament. Jesus’ discourses are a prime example, with the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7) being the example par excellence. The book of Acts contains several defense orations (which, incidentally, follow the conventions of classical forensic orations), sermons, and Paul’s famous speech in Athens at the Areopagus (Acts 17), which follows all of the rhetorical rules of classical oratory. Finally, the oral nature of the Epistles makes them often produce an oratorical effect.
Visionary Writing
Visionary writing is a major biblical genre. It falls into two subgenres—prophetic writing and apocalyptic writing (with the book of Revelation being the chief example). The underlying literary principles are the same in both categories.
Visionary writing pictures settings, characters, and events that differ from ordinary reality. This is not to say that the events of visionary literature did not happen in past history or will not happen in future history. But the events portrayed by the writer had either not yet happened or do not exist in the ordinary world. They are imagined.
The element of “otherness” pervades visionary writing. Visionary literature transforms the known world or the present state of things into a situation that at the time of writing was as yet only imagined. The simplest form of such transformation is a futuristic picture of the changed fortunes of a person or nation. In a more radical form, visionary literature takes us not simply to a different time but to a different mode of existence. It transports us to realms that transcend earthly reality, usually to the supernatural spheres of heaven or hell.
The strangeness of visionary literature extends to both scenes and actors. The scene is typically cosmic instead of localized. Filling this cosmic stage are actors that we do not meet directly in everyday life—God, the saints in heaven, angels, dragons, monsters, a warrior riding a red horse (Rev. 6:4), flying women with wings like those of a stork (Zech. 5:9). The mingling of the familiar and unfamiliar, a hallmark of visionary literature, takes an even stranger form when inanimate objects and forces of nature suddenly become actors—when the stars refuse to show their light or hail and fire mixed with blood fall on the earth.
All of these imaginary fireworks produce a distinctive structure. Visionary literature is structured as a kaleidoscope of shifting elements—visual scenes, speeches, dialogues, brief snatches of narrative, prayers, hymns, and much besides. Dream or vision provides the organization. Dreams, after all, consist of momentary pictures, fleeting impressions, characters and scenes that play their brief part and then drop out of sight, and abrupt jumps from one action to another.
If fantasy is thus a staple of visionary writing, so is symbolism. The strange events that greet us are pictures of something else. The right question to ask is accordingly this: Given the specific context of a visionary passage, of what historical event or what theological fact is this a picture?
The best aid in interpretation is a keen eye for the obvious. When Isaiah pictured a river that would overflow the entire land of Judah (8:5-8), the surrounding context makes it clear that this is a symbolic picture of the imminent invasion by the armies of Assyria. When the book of Revelation pictures the unsuccessful attempt of a dragon to destroy a child who is to rule all the nations and who miraculously escapes from the dragon by ascending into heaven (12:1-5), we recognize it as a symbolic account of Satan’s inability to thwart Jesus during his incarnate life on earth.
THE LITERARY UNITY OF THE BIBLE
The Bible is an anthology of so many different literary genres and techniques that the effect may finally threaten to confuse us. But literary unity will emerge if we remember the underlying principles.
The overall framework of the Bible is that of a story. It begins with the creation of the world and ends with the consummation of history and the recreation of the world. The plot conflict is a prolonged spiritual battle between good and evil. The central character is God, and every creature and nation interacts with this mighty protagonist. Every story, poem, or proverb in the Bible fits into this overarching story.
Furthermore, all of the literary parts of the Bible share the defining traits of literature itself. They present human experience concretely, so that we can share an experience with the author and with characters in a story or poem. The literary parts of the Bible all display technical skill and beauty. They also employ special resources of language, so that we are aware that the writers are doing things with language that go beyond ordinary uses.
Finally, despite the diversity in literary genres found in the Bible, the principle of genre itself helps to organize the picture. Virtually anywhere we turn in the Bible, we are aware that the passage or book belongs to a specific literary genre—a genre that follows its own conventions and that requires a definite set of expectations from the reader.
The Bible is a book for all people and all temperaments, from the prosaic, matter-of-fact to the person who likes far-flung fantasy and visions. The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky had one of his fictional characters exclaim, “What a book the Bible is, what a miracle, what strength is given with it to man. It is like a mould cast of the world and man and human nature, everything is there, and a law for everything for all the ages. And what mysteries are solved and revealed” (Brothers Karamazov).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative, 1981.
Auerbach, Erich; trans. Willard Trask. “Odysseus’ Scar,” chapter 1 of Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953.
Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, 1982.
Gros Louis, Kenneth, ed. Literary Interpretations of Biblical Narratives, 1974.
Lewis, C. S. The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version, 1963.
Longman III, Tremper. Literary Approaches to Biblical Interpretation, 1987.
Ryken, Leland. How to Read the Bible as Literature, 1984.
———, ed. The New Testament in Literary Criticism, 1984.
———. Words of Delight: A Literary Introduction to the Bible, 1987.
———. Words of Life: A Literary Introduction to the New Testament, 1987.