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2022/11/28

How to Read the Bible as Literature: 12

How to Read the Bible as Literature: . . . and Get More Out of It: Chapter Twelve The Literary Unity of the Bible A Book for All Seasons and Temperaments

Chapter Twelve

The Literary Unity of the Bible

A Book for All Seasons and Temperaments

THE LITERARY RANGE AND DIVERSITY OF THE BIBLE are truly impressive. Written by

a variety of writers over a span of many centuries, the Bible is an anthology of liter-

ature, as the very name Bible suggests (biblia, “books”). Previous chapters have

demonstrated how the list of biblical genres keeps expanding. Every aspect of life

is covered in this comprehensive book. Because the Bible is both comprehensive

and written by a variety of writers, it preserves the complexities and polarities of

human experience to an unusual degree. The paradoxes of life are held in tension

in what can be called the most balanced book ever written. The Bible is truly a

book for all seasons and every human temperament.

The Literary Unity of the Bible

But if we stress only the variety of the Bible, we distort the kind of book it is. For

although the Bible does justice to the breadth and fullness of human experience in

a marvelous way, it is also an amazingly unified book. The purpose of this con-

cluding chapter is to suggest some important ways in which the Bible is one book.

In keeping with the literary focus of my book, I will be concerned mainly with the

literary unity of the Bible rather than its theological unity.

THE BIBLE AS A STORY

Narrative Unity in the Bible

The most obvious element of literary unity in the Bible is that it tells a story. It is a

series of events having a beginning, a middle, and an end. Even the external

shapeliness of the Bible is remarkable. It begins with the creation of all things. The

story of the Fall quickly takes the action down to the level of fallen history. But the

story slowly and painfully winds its way to the consummation of history with the

eternal defeat of evil and the triumph of good.

The Unifying Plot Conflict

The overall story of the Bible has a unifying plot conflict. It is the great spiritual

and moral battle between good and evil. A host of details makes up this conflict:

God and Satan, God and his rebellious creatures, good and evil people, inner

human impulses toward obedience to God and disobedience to God. Almost

every story, poem, and proverb in the Bible contributes to this ongoing plot con-

flict between good and evil. Every act and mental attitude shows God’s creatures

engaged in some movement, whether slight or momentous, toward God or away

from him.

The Prevalence of Human Choice

The presence of the great spiritual conflict makes choice on the part of biblical

characters necessary. Every area of human experience is claimed by God and

counterclaimed by the forces of evil. There is no neutral ground. Every human

event shows an allegiance to God or rebellion against him. The Bible concentrates

on the person at the crossroads. Life is momentous for the actors in this drama of

the soul’s choice. Viewed as a story, the Bible is a series of great moral and spir-

itual dilemmas and choices, underscoring the biblical view of people as morally

responsible.

Human Choice, Not External Environment, Is Crucial

In the episodes that make up the overriding story of the Bible, the decisive action

does not reside in external reality itself but consists of a person’s response to what

happens in the world. People’s problems do not stem from outward events or the

material world. Their moral and spiritual choices in history are the crucial action

in the ongoing story of the Bible. Its plot is thus a moral/spiritual action in which

external events provide the occasion for significant action, whether good or bad.

God as Protagonist

Every story has a central protagonist, and in the Bible that protagonist is God. He

is the central character, the actor whose presence unifies the story of universal

history with its myriads of changing human characters. Roland Frye comments:

The characterization of God may indeed be said to be the central literary con-

cern of the Bible, and it is pursued from beginning to end, for the principal

character, or actor, or protagonist of the Bible is God. Not even the most

seemingly insignificant action in the Bible can be understood apart from the

emerging characterization of the deity. With this great protagonist and his de-

signs, all other characters and events interact, as history becomes the great

arena for Goďs characteristic and characterizing actions.¹

The Story of God

It is obvious, then, that the chief element of progression in the overall story of the

Bible is the unfolding purposes of God throughout history. Biblical scholars have

taught us to call this “salvation history”—God’s great plan to save people from

their sin and its eternal consequences. The story of the Bible is the record of

God’s acts—in history, in nature, in the lives of people. Because it is God’s pur-

poses that comprise the essential action, the overriding story of the Bible can be

called the history of the human race within a providential framework of God’s acts

of redemption from, and judgment against, the evil in the universe.

SUMMARY

If we stand back from the Bible and take it in at a single view, it is above all a story,

with many interspersed passages that interpret the meaning of the events. Like

other stories, the Bible has a beginning-middle-end pattern, a unifying plot con-

flict between good and evil, a focus on people in the act of choosing, and a central

protagonist who is God.

THE RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION OF THE BIBLE

The Bible as a Religious Book

The Bible is also unified by its religious orientation. It is pervaded by a

consciousness of God. Human experience is constantly viewed in a religious or

moral light. No matter how artistic and entertaining the Bible is, its writers have a

didactic view of literature. Their purpose is to reveal truth to people so they can

order their lives aright. Two oft-quoted descriptions of this aspect of the Bible are

these:

It is . . . not merely a sacred book but a book so remorselessly and contin-

uously sacred that it does not invite, it excludes or repels, the merely aesthetic

approach.²

The Bible’s claim to truth is not only far more urgent than Homer’s, it is tyran-

nical—it excludes all other claims. The world of the Scripture stories is not

satisfied with claiming to be a historically true reality—it insists that it is the

only real world.³

The Theme of the Two Worlds

Part of the religious orientation of the Bible is the assumption of its writers that

reality consists of two spheres. I call this the theme of the two worlds. Biblical

writers take it for granted that there are two planes of reality—the physical world,

perceived through the senses, and the supernatural world, invisible to ordinary

human view. Both worlds are objectively real, but whereas earthly reality can be

demonstrated empirically, the spiritual world must be accepted on faith. The con-

stant appeal of biblical writers is for people to order their lives by the unseen spir-

itual realities, even though doing so usually contradicts earthly or human stan-

dards.

The Sense of Ultimacy

This transcendental stance of the Bible helps to produce two of its most constant

and distinctive literary qualities. One is the sense of ultimacy with which the Bible

invests human experience. What in most literature would be portrayed as a purely

natural occurrence—the birth of a baby, a shower of rain, the daily course of the

sun—is portrayed in the Bible as being rooted in a divine reality that lends spir-

itual significance to human and natural events. There is a continual penetration of

the supernatural into the earthly order. God is a continual actor in human affairs.

The result is that life becomes filled with meaning, since every event takes on spir-

itual significance.

The Mystery of the Supernatural

The supernatural slant of the Bible also produces a sense of mystery and wonder.

By refusing to allow reality to be conceived solely in terms of known, observable

reality, biblical literature continually transforms the mundane into something with

sacred significance. As readers we are repeatedly confronted with a sense of the

mystery of the divine beyond total human understanding. The Bible is a literature

of mystery and wonder not because it conceals the spiritual but for precisely the

opposite reason: it reveals the spiritual and thereby challenges the natural human

tendency to explain life solely in earthly and natural terms.

Preoccupation With History

The theme of the two worlds does not mean that biblical writers take historical

reality any less seriously. On the contrary, they take it more seriously than is true

of most of the world’s literature. Biblical literature is firmly embedded in historical

reality. It constantly claims to be history and has repeatedly been authenticated as

history by modem archaeology. Compared with the fictional stories of modern

writers, the storytellers of the Bible seem always to be eager to bring in historical

facts. Snatches of historical chronicles, diaries, or genealogies are always creeping

into the stories and poems of the Bible. Of course, the history of the Bible is not

straightforward factual history. The historical facts are always presented within the

interpretive framework of God’s dealings with the human race.

Vivid Consciousness of Values

The religious orientation of the Bible also includes the vivid consciousness of val-

ues that pervades it. Some conception of right and wrong underlies most liter-

ature, but in the Bible this conception is more sharply defined and more strongly

held than elsewhere. For biblical writers the issue of what is good and evil is more

important than anything else. Biblical authors are constantly saying, “This, not

that.” Biblical literature is similarly pervaded by a conviction that some things

matter more than others. Ultimate value does not reside in anything or anyone

apart from its relationship to God, nor can human endeavor be regarded as ulti-

mately valuable apart from obedience to God. In the Bible, good and evil are

supreme realities and are the most important issues in people’s lives.

SUMMARY

One of the unifying elements in the Bible is its general sense of life. The prevailing

attitude or perspective toward life throughout the Bible can only be called reli-

gious. It manifests itself most markedly in its awareness of supernatural reality

and divine mystery, its conviction that human life in history is ultimately signif-

icant, and its vivid consciousness of values. These attitudes become the “air”

within which biblical literature lives and moves and has its being.

UNIFYING THEMES

Unity of Subject Matter

Any body of literature can achieve unity on the basis of its topics and themes. If

individual writers and works share a common subject matter, the literature in-

evitably begins to create a unified impression in a reader’s mind. This is exactly

what happens in the Bible. Individual biblical writers tend overwhelmingly to be

preoccupied with a core of shared concerns.

The Character of God

Dominating everything is the character of God. The question of what God is like

underlies more biblical passages than does any other concern. The most cus-

tomary way of answering the question in the Bible is by narrating what God has

done, but the Psalms, Prophets, Gospels, and New Testament Epistles also

contain many direct statements about who God is in his inner being. This theme

of God’s self-revelation is so pervasive in the Bible that nearly every passage will

provide an answer to the overriding question, What is God like?

The View of People

Balancing this preoccupation with God is a constant concern with people. This is

not surprising, because the subject of literature is human experience. Most works

of biblical literature are an implied assertion about human nature and destiny. Re-

peated themes include the significance of the individual, the importance of the

individual’s relationship to God and society, the simultaneous physical and

moral/spiritual make-up of people, moral responsibility, and the capacity to make

moral and spiritual choices.

The corresponding questions to ask of the stories, poems, proverbs, and vi-

sions of the Bible include these: according to this passage, what are people like?

What are their longings and fears? What values (for example, home, wealth, nature,

God) are most worthy and least worthy of human pursuit? How can a person achieve

meaning and happiness in life?

The Divine-Human Relationship

Usually the twin topics of God and people appear together in biblical passages,

making the theme of the divine-human relationship one of the big ideas of the

Bible. Roland Frye theorizes that

the pervasive theme of the Bible is the interaction between individuals, soci-

eties, and God, and one of the pervasive purposes of the Bible is to derive out

of these interactions a clarification of each of the constituent elements.

Throughout it is assumed that man cannot understand himself apart from

God. . . .⁴

The theme of the divine-human relationship means that the Bible is a continuous

exploration of people’s inescapable connections with deity and God’s unrelenting

interest in what people do. The most customary biblical way of portraying this

relationship is the idea of covenant.

Human Evil and Suffering

Biblical authors write in a painful awareness that the divine-human relationship

has been disrupted. A literary scholar writes, “From the quantitative point of view,

three central subjects emerge. . . . This threefold theme is the interest of God in

man, the wrath of God, and the weakness or rather the wickedness of humanity.’’⁵

This is similar to T. R. Henn’s belief that “overriding all else” is “the problem, re-

stated constantly and from many angles of experience, of evil and suffering.”⁶

The Acts of God

Another topic that pervades the pages of the Bible is the history of God’s acts—his

dealings with individual people, with Old Testament Israel, with the New Testa-

ment church. G. Ernest Wright has popularized the concept of the acts of God as

the unifying center of the Bible.⁷ These acts fall mainly into the categories of cre-

ation, redemption or salvation, and judgment. The concept of salvation history

(discussed above) is virtually synonymous with the theme of the acts of God.

Whatever designation we use, the theme remains the purposes of God as they

occur in history. The corresponding question to ask of a given biblical passage is,

What is the nature of God’s acts? What does or did God do, and for what purpose?

The Acts of People

The concern with what God does is almost always accompanied in the Bible by

the theme of what people do or ought to do. Human behavior is a constant sub-

ject of biblical literature. It tends to fall into the dual pattern of virtuous behavior

and sinful behavior. The Bible moves between the poles of human waywardness

and human virtue. Using the twin techniques of portraying negative examples of

vice to avoid and positive examples of virtue to imitate, the Bible presents a uni-

fied moral vision. This ethical unity of the Bible pervades both the expository parts

and the literary sections, where it is incarnated in human characters, whether they

be people actually doing things or the speaker in a lyric poem expressing the inner

weather of his feelings (which also have moral implications in the Bible). The uni-

fying moral preoccupation in biblical literature makes these questions relevant to

most biblical texts: What is typical or characteristic of human behavior? How should

people behave? In the Bible, description of human behavior is combined with an

evaluative bias in such a way as to leave the reader with a sense of moral duty—of

how people ought to live. Ethical duty, moreover, is not pictured as selfexertion

toward moral perfection but as submission to Goďs law or conformity to his char-

acter.

Law and Grace

Luther and the Reformers interpreted the Bible through a thematic grid of law and

gospel that is still useful as a way of seeing the unity of the Bible. In this view, the

message of a biblical passage is either law or gospel (or both). “Law” is anything

that exposes human ruin through sin. “Gospel” refers to everything that displays

people’s restoration through faith in God’s grace. To use Melanchthon’s formula,

“The law indicates the sickness, the gospel the remedy.” When flexibly applied,

this framework of human sinfulness and divine grace yields much. Of most bib-

lical passages we can ask, What does this text say about human sinfulness and/or

God's grace?

Promise and Fulfillment

The theme of Goďs promises and their fulfillment is also a controlling theme of the

Bible. T. R. Henn speaks of the Bible’s “two major symphonic movements of

promise and fulfillment.”⁸ This pattern appears in many forms, small and big, but

the most important example is the relationship between the Old Testament and

the New. This relationship has been well summarized by H. H. Rowley: “The Old

Testament continually looks forward to something beyond itself; the New Testa-

ment continually looks back to the Old. Neither is complete without something

beyond itself.”⁹

Old and New Testaments

The New Testament builds upon the Old, bringing anticipations to fruition.

Northrop Frye describes this overarching pattern of promise and fulfillment:

There is a very large number of these references to the Old Testament in the

New: they extend over every book—not impossibly every passage—in the New

Testament. . . .The general principle of interpretation is traditionally given as

“In the Old Testament the New Testament is concealed; in the New Testament

the Old Testament is revealed.” Everything that happens in the Old Testament

is a “type” or adumbration of something that happens in the New Testament,

and the whole subject is therefore called typology.¹⁰

The result is a book in which no part is wholly self-contained but instead carries

echoes from many other parts.

Unity of Reference

The vast system of interlocking references and allusions is not confined to New Testa-

ment fulfillments of Old Testament foreshadowings. Biblical writers share a com-

mon framework of reference. They keep referring to the same core of faith events.

These events make up the underlying story of the Bible and are arranged into the

following sequence: Creation, Fall, Covenant (promises of God to the patriarchs

and Israelite nation), Exodus (including Revelation at Mount Sinai and Conquest

of Canaan), Israelite Monarchy, Exile and Return, Life and Teaching of Jesus,

Salvation (accomplished by the Death and Resurrection of Jesus), the Beginnings

of the Christian Church, Consummation of History. This outline can be either ex-

panded or telescoped. Northrop Frye divides the biblical story into seven “phases

of revelation”: Creation, Revolution, Law, Wisdom, Prophecy, Gospel,

Apocalypse.¹¹

This outline by itself imposes a loose unity on the Bible, but a much greater

degree of cohesion results from the way in which biblical writers so consistently

refer to this overriding story and its accompanying doctrines. No other long book

in the world contains the interlocking system of references that have been codified

in modern Bibles with cross references in the margins.

Unity of Faith

There is, finally, a unity of faith that welds the Bible into an organic whole. The

Bible is not a theological outline, but the ideas that are stated and embodied in the

Bible add up to a coherent system of doctrine. This doctrinal framework is a uni-

fying context within which we should read individual parts. Everywhere we turn in

the Bible, it is the same God and the same view of people that we encounter. The

physical world is not considered good in one biblical book and evil in another. Of

course, no single passage by itself “covers the whole territory” on a given topic.

Individual parts of the Bible are interdependent. When we put the parts together,

we find a coherent set of doctrines whose main tenets include consistently held

views about God, the nature of people, creation (nature, the physical world),

providence, God’s revelation as the source of truth, good and evil, salvation, and

eschatology.

SUMMARY

As we read the Bible, we continually encounter a core of topics and themes. They

include the character and acts of God, human nature and activity, moral good and

evil, law and grace, promise and fulfillment. Biblical writers frequently refer to the

same events that make up biblical history, and they share a common set of reli-

gious beliefs.

LITERARY ARCHETYPES IN THE BIBLE

A Definition of Archetypes

Literature is a great interlocking system in which we are continuously reminded of

characters, situations, and symbols that we have encountered in other works of

literature. These recurrent units are called archetypes. They fall into three cate-

gories: images (such as light, mountaintop, or prison), character types (such as the

hero, villain, or tempter), and plot motifs (such as the quest, fall from innocence,

or rescue). Archetypes are the basic building blocks of the literary imagination.

When we read literature we are constantly in touch with them. Of course they

recur in literature because they are pervasive in life. In both literature and life,

archetypes elicit powerful universal responses from the human psyche.

A Pattern of Opposites

Archetypes tend overwhelmingly to fall into a pattern of opposites. We can label

the two categories wish and nightmare, or the ideal and unideal, or the good and

the evil. Together they are a vision of the kind of world that people want and do

not want. The following table lists the most important archetypal images and char-

acter types in the Bible, arranged according to the dialectical pattern of opposites.

The Archetypes of Ideal Experience

The supernatural: God; angels; the heavenly society.

Human characters: the hero or heroine; the virtuous wife / husband / mother / fa-

ther; the bride / groom; the innocent child; the benevolent king or ruler; the

priest; the wiseman; the shepherd; the pilgrim.

Human relationships: the community, city, or tribe; images of communion, order,

unity, friendship, love; the wedding or marriage; the feast, meal, or supper; the

harmonious family; freedom; covenant, contract, or treaty.

Clothing: any stately garment symbolizing legitimate position or success; festal

garments such as wedding clothes; fine clothing given as gifts of hospitality;

white or light colored clothing; clothing of adornment (such as jewels); protec-

tive clothing such as a warrior’s armor.

The human body: images of health, strength, vitality, potency, sexual fertility (in-

cluding womb and seed); feats of strength and dexterity; images of sleep and

rest; happy dreams; birth.

Food: staples such as bread, milk, and meat; luxuries such as wine and honey; the

harvest of grain.

Animals: a community of domesticated animals, usually a flock of sheep or herd

of cattle; the lamb; a gentle bird, often a dove; a faithful domesticated animal

or pet; any animal friendly to people; singing birds; animals or birds noted for

their strength, such as the lion or eagle; fish.

Landscape: a garden, grove, or park; the mountaintop or hill; the fertile and secure

valley; pastoral settings or farms; the safe pathway or easily traveled highway.

Plants: green grass; the rose; the vineyard; the tree of life; any productive tree; the

lily; evergreen plants (symbolic of immortality); herbs or plants of healing.

Buildings: the city; the palace or castle; the military stronghold; the tabernacle,

temple, or church; the house or home; the tower of contemplation; the capital

city, symbol of the nation.

The inorganic world: images of jewels and precious stones, often glowing and fiery;

fire and brilliant light; burning that purifies and refines; rocks of refuge.

Water: a river or stream; a spring or fountain; showers of rain; dew; flowing water

of any type; tranquil pools; water used for cleansing.

Forces of nature: the breeze or wind; the spring and summer seasons; calm after

storm; the sun or the lesser light of the moon and stars; light, sunrise, day.

Sounds: musical harmony; singing; laughter.

Direction and motion: images of ascent, rising, height (especially the mountaintop

and tower), motion (as opposed to stagnation).

The Archetypes of Unideal Experience

The supernatural: Satan; demons or evil spirits; evil beasts and monsters such as

those in the Book of Revelation; pagan idols.

Human characters: the villain; the tempter or temptress; the harlot/prostitute; the

taskmaster, tyrant, or oppressor (usually a foreign oppressor); the wanderer,

outcast, or exile; the traitor; the sluggard or lazy person; the hypocrite; the false

religious leader or priest; the fool; the drunkard; the thief.

Human relationships: tyranny or anarchy; isolation among people; images of tor-

ture (the cross, stake, scaffold, gallows, stocks, etc.), slavery, or bondage; im-

ages of war, riot, feud, or family discord.

Clothing: ill-fitting garments (often symbolic of a position that is usurped and not

held legitimately); garments symbolizing mourning (such as sackcloth, rent

garments, dark mourning garments); dark clothes; tattered, dirty, or coarse

clothing; any clothing that suggests poverty or bondage; a conspicuous excess

of clothing.

The human body: images of disease, deformity, barrenness, injury, or mutilation;

sleeplessness or nightmare, often related to guilt of conscience; death.

Food: hunger, drought, starvation, cannibalism; poison; drunkenness.

Animals: monsters or beasts of prey; the wolf (enemy of sheep), tiger, dragon, vul-

ture, owl (associated with darkness/ignorance), or hawk; the cold and earth-

bound snake; any wild animal harmful to people; the goat; the unclean animals

of Old Testament ceremonial law.

Landscape: the dark forest; the wilderness or wasteland (which is either too hot or

too cold); the dark and dangerous valley; the underground cave or tomb; the

labyrinth; the dangerous or evil pathway.

Plants: the thorn or thistle; weeds; dead or dying plants; unproductive plants; the

willow tree (symbolic of mourning).

Buildings: the prison or dungeon; the wicked city of violence, sexual perversion, or

crime; the tower of imprisonment or wicked aspiration (the tower of Babel);

pagan temples.

The inorganic world: the inorganic world in its unworked form of deserts, rocks,

and wilderness; dry dust or ashes; fire that destroys and tortures instead of

purifying; rust and decay.

Water: the sea and all that it contains (sea beasts and water monsters); stagnant

pools (including the Dead Sea).

Forces of nature: the storm or tempest; the autumn and winter seasons; sunset,

darkness, night.

Sounds: discordant sounds, cacophony, weeping, wailing.

Direction and motion: images of descent, lowness, stagnation or immobility, suffo-

cation, confinement.

The Organizing Function of Archetypes

This chart of archetypes outlines the basic “language” of the literary imagination

throughout the Bible. The list of images and character types is an organizing

framework for the entire Bible. The unity of the Bible is partly a unity of master im-

ages.

The One Story of Literature

Archetypes can also consist of plot motifs. In fact, all of literature adds up to a

single composite story known in literary circles as “the monomyth” (the “one

story” of literature). The monomyth, which should not be confused with “mythol-

ogy,” is shaped like a circle and has four separate phases. As such, it corresponds

to some familiar cycles of human experience. The cycle of the year, for example,

consists of the sequence summer-fall-winter-spring. A day moves through a cycle

consisting of sunrise-zenith-sunset-darkness. A person’s life passes from birth to

adulthood to old age to death. The monomyth, too, is a cycle having four phases.

We can picture the “one story” of literature like this:

Romance portrays idealized human experience—life as we wish it to be. Its oppo-

site, anti-romance, pictures a world of bondage and misery. Tragedy narrates a fall

downward from bliss to catastrophe, while comedy narrates a rise from bondage

to happiness and freedom. These are the four kinds of literary material, and to-

gether they make up the composite story of literature. It is easy to see how the two

categories of archetypal images and character types noted above make up the

upper and lower halves of the monomyth.

Archetypal Plot Motifs

The monomyth is the most general or universal A pattern to be found in literature.

The circular Motifs pattern of the monomyth takes a number of specific forms, in-

cluding the following:

1. The quest, in which a hero struggles to reach a goal, undergoing obstacles

and temporary defeat before achieving success (Abraham’s quest for a son and

Ruth’s quest for a home).

2. The death-rebirth motif¦ in which a hero endures death or danger and returns

to life or security (the stories of Hezekiah and Jesus).

3. The initiation, in which a character is thrust out of an existing, usually ideal,

situation and undergoes a series of ordeals as he or she encounters various forms

of evil or hardship for the first time (the stories of Jacob and Joseph).

4. The journey, in which characters encounter danger and experience growth as

they move from one place to another (the stories of Abraham and the Exodus).

5. Tragedy, or its more specific form of the fall from innocence, (the stories of

Adam/Eve and David/Bathsheba).

6. Comedy, a U-shaped story that begins in prosperity, descends into tragedy,

but rises to a happy ending as obstacles to success are overcome (the stories of

Esther and Job).

7. Crime and punishment (the stories of Cain and King Saul).

8. The temptation, in which someone becomes the victim of an evil tempter or

temptress (the stories of Eve and Samson/Delilah).

9. The rescue (the stories of Esther and of Elisha at Dothan).

10. The suffering servant or scapegoat pattern, in which a character undergoes

unmerited suffering in order to secure the welfare of others (the stories of Joseph

and Jesus).

Type Scenes

In addition to archetypal plot motifs, there are type scenes (not to be confused

with types or typology) in the Bible. A type scene is a story pattern or situation that

recurs often enough in the Bible that we can identify a set of conventions and

expectations for each one. Each type scene has its constituent ingredients in an

established order. An awareness of such type scenes can become a significant

organizing pattern for either individual books of the Bible or the Bible as a whole.

Type Scenes in the Book of Acts

In the Book of Acts, for example, the following cycle of events keeps getting re-

peated: God raises up leaders who preach the Gospel; they perform mighty works;

crowds are drawn and many hearers are converted; opposition and persecution

arise against the leaders; God intervenes to rescue them; and on to a new reen-

actment of the cycle.¹² Other type scenes also unify the Book of Acts—preaching

the gospel, conversion stories, and trial/defense scenes.

Type Scenes Throughout the Bible

Such type scenes occur throughout the Bible. Robert Alter cites the Old Testament

examples of “the annunciation . . . of the birth of the hero to his barcen mother;

the encounter with the future betrothed at a well; the epiphany in the field; the ini-

tiatory trial; danger in the desert and the discovery of a well or other source of

sustenance; the testament of the dying hero.”¹³ The type scene that dominates the

story of the Exodus is the situation that unfolds according to this sequence: cri-

sis—com-plaint by the people—call to God by Moses—divine rescue/provision—

reve-tion or rebuke by God. The Gospels have their distinctive type scenes: heal-

ing stories, pronouncement stories, preaching to the crowds, encounter stories,

Passion stories. Each biblical type scene consists of a set of conventional ele-

ments, usually in a set order.

SUMMARY

The Bible is not a collection of isolated fragments. It is a vast system of recurring

images, character types, plot motifs, and type scenes. As we read a given biblical

passage, we are reminded of other similar material elsewhere in the Bible. In this

process, the Bible assumes a remarkable unity in our thinking.

UNIFYING STYLISTIC TRAITS

The Bible is written in a rich variety of styles. In the midst of all the variety,

however, certain stylistic tendencies help to give the Bible a discernible literary

unity. There are, of course, numerous passages that do not fit the generalizations I

am about to note, but the very fact that we think of these as exceptions proves the

validity of the general rules that scholars have attributed to the Bible’s style.

Concrete Rather Than Abstract

The biblical tendency toward the concrete is well known. There are many great ab-

stractions in the Bible (including the Psalms), but in general the biblical writers

show a concern for things rather than ideas. God is portrayed as light and rock

and thunder. Wealth is visible and tangible. So are human emotions. Even the

prose sections of the Bible resemble poetry in their reliance on concrete images.

Realism

The Bible is a realistic book. Its characters and settings are predominantly

nonaristocratic (unlike other ancient literature). The Bible, writes Erich Auerbach,

“engenders a new elevated style, which does not scorn everyday life and which is

ready to absorb the sensorily realistic, even the ugly, the undignified, the physi-

cally base.’’¹⁴ The Bible also portrays the flaws of even its best characters.

Simplicity

The style of the Bible is marked by simplicity. Its characteristic imagery comes

from daily life. Its narrative style is plain and unembellished, with only the essen-

tial details included. Shakespeare has a vocabulary of more than fifteen thousand

words and Milton thirteen thousand, while the King James Bible has a vocabulary

of about six thousand different words.¹⁵ The biblical imagination also operates

with simplified dichotomies, such as light and darkness, good and evil, heroes

and villains, the tiny nation against its overpowering enemies. “The simplicity of

the Bible,’’ writes Northrop Frye, “is the simplicity of majesty. . . ; its simplicity ex-

presses the voice of authority.’’¹⁶

Elemental Quality

The Bible is par excellence the book of elemental human experience. It depicts what

is true for all people in all times and places. In the words of John Livingston

Lowes, “the Biblical vocabulary is compact of the primal stuff of our common

humanity—of its universal emotional, sensory experiences.”¹⁷ Someone else has

expressed it thus:

The themes of the Bible are simple and primary. Life is reduced to a few basic

activities—fighting, farming, a strong sexual urge, and intermittent worship. . .

.We confront basic virtues and primitive vices. . . .The world these persons in-

habit is stripped and elemental—sea, desert, the stars, the wind, storm, sun,

clouds, and moon, seedtime and harvest. . . . Occupation has this elementary

quality also.¹⁸

Brevity

The Bible displays a preference for brevity over length. Biblical writers overwhelm-

ingly work with brief units that are relatively self-contained. Individual episodes in

stories from Genesis through the Gospels are almost never elaborated at length.

The characters in these stories are illuminated by momentary flashes of heroism

or evil or courage and so forth. When we move from the stories of the Bible to

other genres, the forms are consistently brief ones: lyric, song, parable, proverb,

prophetic vision, letter. The aphoristic, or proverbial, style of the Bible is a further

evidence of this preference for conciseness and economy. The Bible is therefore a

vast collection of concentrated moments of epiphany, “a series of ecstatic mo-

ments or points of expanding apprehension,” as Northrop Frye calls it.¹⁹

Repetition

All of literature relies on various forms of repetition, but the Bible has even more

of it than most literature, probably because so much of the Bible was originally

oral literature. In poetry this urge for repetition takes the form of parallelism and

rhetorical patterns. There is an equal abundance of repetition in the stories of the

Bible, Jesus’ parables and discourses, and the Epistles.²⁰

The Spoken Word

The style of the Bible is an oral style. The prevalence of dialogue in biblical narra-

tive is unique in ancient literature.²¹ But the Bible is everywhere filled with voices

speaking and replying. To read the Bible well is to become a listener, either literally

or in one’s imagination.

Affective Power

The style of the Bible is predominantly affective. It moves us as well as appealing

to our reason. It convinces us by evoking a response from us. The characteristic

(though not exclusive) biblical way of conducting an argument is to repeat the

main point so often that we feel or experience the truth of the assertion. The sto-

ries and parables of the Bible force us to respond to characters and events. The

poems and oratory and Epistles are impassioned.

SUMMARY

The style of the Bible is uniquely powerful and beautiful. It can be parodied but

never duplicated. The elements that make the Bible the most expressive book in

the world include concreteness, realism, simplicity, an elemental quality, brevity,

repetition, emphasis on the spoken word, and affective power.