How to Read the Bible as Literature: 1

How to Read the Bible as Literature: . . . and Get More Out of It

Contents 

 

Preface 

1. Is the Bible Literature? 

2. The Stories of the Bible 

3. Types of Biblical Stories 

4. The Poetry of the Bible 

5. Types of Biblical Poetry 

6. The Proverb as a Literary Form 

7. The Gospels 

8. Parables 

9. The Epistles 

10. Satire 

11. Visionary Literature 

12. The Literary Unity of the Bible 

Appendix: The Allegorical Nature of the Parables 

Index of Persons 

Index of Subjects

Preface The one thing the Bible is not is what it is so often thought to be—a theological outline with proof texts attached. Asked to define neighbor, Jesus told a story (Luke 10:25–27). Likewise, Jesus’ aphoristic command “Remember Lot’s wife’’ (Luke 17:32) shows that he believed that truth can be embodied in concrete examples or images as well as in moral propositions. When asked by his disciples why he spoke in parables, Jesus outlined a theory of communication (Matt. 13:10–17) based on the lit- erary principle of indirection: he concealed the truth from immediate perception in order to reveal it to listeners who were willing to ponder his parables. Instances from the life of Jesus such as these suggest a literary approach to truth that frequently avoids direct propositional statement and embodies truth in distinctly literary forms. Furthermore, there is a preoccupation among biblical writers with artistry, verbal craftsmanship, and aesthetic beauty. The writer of Ecclesiastes presents a theory of writing that stresses beauty of expression as well as truthfulness of content; he labored to arrange proverbs “with great care’’ and “sought to find pleasing words’’ (Eccl. 12:9–10 RSV). If the Bible is an artistically beautiful as well as a truthful book, it demands a literary approach in addition to the historical and theological approaches. Traditionally, we have been so preoccupied with the hermeneutical question of how to interpret what the Bible says that we have been left impoverished in techniques to describe and interact with the text itself. In the thirteenth century, Roger Bacon argued that the church had done a good job of communicating the theological content of the Bible but had failed to make the literal level of the biblical text come alive in people’s imaginations. We are in a similar situation today, even though the literary emphasis on the primary or literal level of a biblical text actually builds upon the grammatico-historical method of interpretation, which likewise aims to take a reader as close as possible to the originally intended, plain meaning of the text. This book is an introduction to the literary forms of the Bible, with emphasis on the activities that those forms require of a reader. It is a “grammar” of literary forms and techniques. As such, it is a companion or supplement to similar handbooks by biblical scholars. I am happy for this occasion to thank my Wheaton College colleagues Alan Johnson of the Bible Department and Jim Wilhoit of the Christian Education Department for their unfailing helpfulness in pointing me to material from their disciplines and in sparing me from errors of ignorance. This book also benefited from criticism by Ron Allen of Western Conservative Baptist Seminary and Stanley Gundry, Editor-in-Chief at Zondervan. I am equally indebted to my wife, Mary, for serving as stylistic critic and proofreader. I have taken most of my biblical quotations from the New International Version. Where I have used the King James Version (KJ) or the Revised Standard Version (RSV), I have so indicated.


Preface

The one thing the Bible is not is what it is so often thought to be—a theological outline with proof texts attached.
Asked to define neighbor, Jesus told a story (Luke 10:25–27). Likewise, Jesus’ aphoristic command “Remember Lot’s wife’’ (Luke
17:32) shows that he believed that truth can be embodied in concrete examples or images as well as in moral propositions.
When asked by his disciples why he spoke in parables, Jesus outlined a theory of communication (Matt. 13:10–17) based on the lit-
erary principle of indirection: he concealed the truth from immediate perception in order to reveal it to listeners who were willing to
ponder his parables. Instances from the life of Jesus such as these suggest a literary approach to truth that frequently avoids direct
propositional statement and embodies truth in distinctly literary forms.
Furthermore, there is a preoccupation among biblical writers with artistry, verbal craftsmanship, and aesthetic beauty. The writer of
Ecclesiastes presents a theory of writing that stresses beauty of expression as well as truthfulness of content; he labored to arrange
proverbs “with great care’’ and “sought to find pleasing words’’ (Eccl. 12:9–10 RSV). If the Bible is an artistically beautiful as well as a
truthful book, it demands a literary approach in addition to the historical and theological approaches.
Traditionally, we have been so preoccupied with the hermeneutical question of how to interpret what the Bible says that we have
been left impoverished in techniques to describe and interact with the text itself. In the thirteenth century, Roger Bacon argued that the
church had done a good job of communicating the theological content of the Bible but had failed to make the literal level of the biblical
text come alive in people’s imaginations. We are in a similar situation today, even though the literary emphasis on the primary or literal
level of a biblical text actually builds upon the grammatico-historical method of interpretation, which likewise aims to take a reader as
close as possible to the originally intended, plain meaning of the text.
This book is an introduction to the literary forms of the Bible, with emphasis on the activities that those forms require of a reader. It
is a “grammar” of literary forms and techniques. As such, it is a companion or supplement to similar handbooks by biblical scholars.
I am happy for this occasion to thank my Wheaton College colleagues Alan Johnson of the Bible Department and Jim Wilhoit of the
Christian Education Department for their unfailing helpfulness in pointing me to material from their disciplines and in sparing me from
errors of ignorance. This book also benefited from criticism by Ron Allen of Western Conservative Baptist Seminary and Stanley
Gundry, Editor-in-Chief at Zondervan. I am equally indebted to my wife, Mary, for serving as stylistic critic and proofreader.
I have taken most of my biblical quotations from the New International Version. Where I have used the King James Version (KJ) or
the Revised Standard Version (RSV), I have so indicated.

===

Chapter One Is the Bible Literature?  New Directions in Biblical Studies THERE IS A QUIET REVOLUTION GOING ON in the study of the Bible. At its center is a growing awareness that the Bible is a work of liter- ature and that the methods of literary scholarship are a necessary part of any complete study of the Bible. There are two sides to the movement: literary scholars are showing increasing interest in applying their methods to the Bible, and Bible scholars are calling for a literary approach.¹ A number of ingredients make up this new approach to the Bible: a concern with the literary genres of the Bible; a new willingness to treat biblical texts as finished wholes instead of as a patchwork of fragments; a focus on the Bible as it now stands instead of con- ducting excavations in the redaction (editing) process behind the text; an inclination to use literary instead of traditional theological terms to discuss the stories and poems of the Bible; an appreciation for the artistry of the Bible; a sensitivity to the experiential, extra- intellectual (more-than-ideational) dimension of the Bible.  Approaching the Bible as Literature  But above all, the new attitude toward the Bible involves a growing awareness that literature expresses truth in its own way, different from ordinary propositional discourse. In other words, when the Bible employs a literary method, it asks to be approached as literature and not as something else. In the words of C. S. Lewis, “There is a . . . sense in which the Bible, since it is after all literature, cannot properly be read except as literature; and the different parts of it as the different sorts of literature they are.”²  Defining the Term “Literature”  The purpose of this opening chapter is to identify what makes a text “literature.” I should say at once that by the term “literature” I do not mean everything that is written. I use it in a more restricted sense to mean the types of writing that are often called “imaginative literature” or “creative writing,” in contrast to expository writing. In this chapter, I am in effect defining those parts of the Bible that are like the works covered in high school and college literature courses.  The Literary Continuum  By thus defining literature I am not establishing an “either-or” method of distinguishing between literary and nonliterary texts. The Bible is obviously a mixed book. Literary and nonliterary (expository, explanatory) writing exist side by side within the covers of this unique book. I have no intention of building a “great divide” that would make a biblical passage either literature or nonliterature. Instead, I am describing a continuum, or scale, on which some parts of the Bible are more literary and other parts are less literary.  More Than One Approach Is Necessary  Nor do I wish to suggest that the literary parts of the Bible cannot be approached in other ways as well. I do not question that the lit- erary parts can and should also be approached as history and theology. My claim is simply that the literary approach is one necessary way to read and interpret the Bible, an approach that has been unjustifiably neglected.  Building on Biblical Scholarship  Despite that neglect, the literary approach builds at every turn on what biblical scholars have done to recover the original, intended meaning of the biblical text. In fact, the literary approach that I describe in this book is a logical extension of what is commonly known as the grammatico-historical method of biblical interpretation. Both approaches insist that we must begin with the literal meaning of the words of the Bible as determined by the historical setting in which the authors wrote.  The Parable of the Good Samaritan  The best way into the subject is to look at a couple of examples. One of the most memorable passages in the whole Bible is the parable Jesus told when a lawyer asked him to define who his neighbor was. Here is the definition of “neighbor” that Jesus gave (Luke 10:30– 36):  A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. “Look after him,” he said, “and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.” Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?  The Incarnational Nature of Literature  Everything about this passage makes it a piece of literature. We should notice first that Jesus never gives an abstract or propositional definition of “neighbor.” Instead, he tells a story that embodies what it means to be a neighbor. This suggests at once the most impor- tant thing about literature: its subject matter is human experience, not abstract ideas. Literature incarnates its meanings as concretely as 

possible. The knowledge that literature gives of a subject is the kind of knowledge that is obtained by (vicariously) living through an experience. Jesus could have defined neighbor abstractly, as a dictionary does, but he chose a literary approach to the truth instead. This is comparable to an experience we probably have all had when struggling with the assembly of a toy or appliance: when we have a good picture, we may not even need the written instructions.  The Primacy of Imagination (Image-Making)  Because literature presents an experience instead of telling us about that experience, it constantly appeals to our imagination (the image- making and image-perceiving capacity within us). Literature images forth some aspect of reality. Consider all the sensory images and gestures we encounter in this parable: robbers stripping and beating a victim on a road, specific people traveling down the road, first- aid equipment consisting of such tangibles as oil and wine, and such physical things as a donkey and an inn and money. We visualize the Samaritan lifting the victim onto his donkey and see the money exchange hands and listen to the instructions at the inn.  The Genre of Story  The form of the parable is as literary as the content is. For one thing, it is a story or narrative, and this is a distinctly literary genre (“type”). The story, moreover, is told with an abundance of literary artistry. It follows the storytelling principle of threefold repetition: a given event happens three times, with a crucial change introduced the third time. The story begins with vivid plot conflict to seize the listener’s attention, and from the very start the story generates suspense about its outcome. Jesus also makes skillful use of foils (con- trasts that “set off” or heighten the main point of the story): the neighborliness of the Samaritan stands out all the more clearly by its contrast with the indifference of the priest and of the Levite.  Unity, Coherence, Emphasis  Well-constructed stories have unity, coherence, and emphasis. Judged by these artistic criteria, this parable of Jesus is a small master- piece. Nothing is extraneous to the unifying theme of neighborly behavior from an unlikely source. The very construction of the story makes the emphasis fall on the good Samaritan. One critic describes it thus:  The aborted sequences with the priest and Levite provide a pattern which causes the listener to anticipate the third traveler and build up tension. Since this threefold pattern is so common in popular story telling, we also anticipate that the third traveler will be the one who will actually help. Our attention is focused on the third traveler before he arrives, and this heightens the shock when we discover that he neither fits the pattern of cultural expectation nor the pattern of expectation created by the series of priest, Levite.³  Reader Involvement  Not only is the parable inherently literary; its effect on the reader is also literary. The story does not primarily require our minds to grasp an idea but instead gets us to respond with our imagination and emotions to a real-life experience. It puts us on the scene and makes us participants in the action. It gets us involved with characters about whose destiny we are made to care. Literature, in short, is affective, not cool and detached. This, of course, made it such an effective teaching medium for Jesus, whose parables often drew his listeners innocently into the story and then turned the tables on them after it was too late to evade the issue at hand.  SUMMARY  What makes the parable of the good Samaritan a work of literature? Everything about it: its experiential approach to truth, its sensory concreteness, its narrative genre, its carefully crafted construction, and its total involvement of the reader—intellectually, emotionally, imaginatively.  Psalm 23 as a Literary Work  As Exhibit B, we consider the world’s greatest poem, Psalm 23 (RSV):  The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; he makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness [right paths] for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies; thou anointest my head with oil, my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me 

all the days of my life; and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.  The Genre of Poetry  What indicates that this is literary writing? We can tell at a glance that this is poetry, another distinctly literary genre. The recurring unit is the poetic line, not the sentence. Furthermore, nearly every line follows the same grammatical pattern (God is identified as the actor, and then an action is ascribed to him), and many of the sentences fall into a pattern of pairs in which the second repeats the thought of the first in different words. In short, Psalm 23 is written in a verse form known as parallelism. It possesses a memorable, aphoristic quality that ordinary discourse lacks.  Unity and Shapeliness  There is equal artistry in the unity and shapeliness of the poem as a whole. The poem begins by announcing the theme and the control- ling metaphor (the sheep-shepherd relationship). It then proceeds to a catalog of the shepherd’s acts on behalf of his sheep, from the noontime resting in the shade to the activities performed in the sheepfold at the end of the day. And the poem ends with a forward- pointing note of finality. Psalm 23 has a self-contained, carefully crafted quality that we associate with art.  Literary Concreteness  Turning from the form to the content, we again sense how literary this text is. We see once more the literary impulse to be concrete in- stead of abstract. Psalm 23 takes God’s providence as its subject. But the psalmist does not use the word providence and does not give us a theological definition of the concept. To drive this point home, we might contrast the literary approach of Psalm 23 with the theo- logical definition of providence in the Westminster Confession of Faith:  God the Creator of all things doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least, by His most wise and holy providence. . . .  The approach of Psalm 23 is the opposite. It turns the idea of God’s providence into a metaphor in which God is pictured as a shep- herd in the daily routine of caring for his sheep. The literary approach of Psalm 23 is indirect: first we must picture what the shepherd does for his sheep, and then we must transfer that picture to the human level. Instead of using abstract, theological terminology, Psalm 23 consistently keeps us in a world of concrete images: green pastures, water, pathways, rod and staff, table, oil, cup, and sheepfold (metaphorically called a house).  The Differentia of Literature  How does literature work? Psalm 23 again shows us. Literature is concrete and experiential. It uses tangible images to convey the very quality of lived experience. It appeals to our imagination (image-making capacity). It conveys more meanings than ordinary expository language does—it would take several pages of expository prose to paraphrase all the meanings Psalm 23 compresses into nineteen lines. Psalm 23 is more concentrated, more consistently concrete, more obviously artistic, more eloquent and beautiful, than ordinary prose discourse. The parable of the good Samaritan and Psalm 23 are typical of the kind of literary writing we keep running into as we read through the Bible. From these two examples I wish to branch out into a more systematic anatomy of the principles that underlie a literary ap- proach to the Bible.  LITERATURE: THE VOICE OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE The Subject of Literature: Human Experience  It is a commonplace that the subject of literature is human experience—not abstract ideas or propositions, but experience. The knowl- edge or truth that literature gives us is an awareness of reality or truth as it is actually experienced. Literature, in other words, shows human experience instead of telling about it. It is incarnational. It enacts rather than states. Instead of giving us abstract propositions about virtue or vice, for example, literature presents stories of good or evil characters in action. The tendency of literature is to embody human experience, not to formulate ideas in intellectual propositions.  The Difference Between Literary and Expository Writing  We can profitably contrast the literary and the expository, or documentary, use of language. Expository (“explanatory”) writing seeks to tell us, as objectively and clearly as possible, facts and information about a subject. Literature, by contrast, appeals to our imagination. Literature aims to recreate an experience or situation in sufficient detail and concreteness to enable the reader to relive it. The Bible contains an abundance of both expository and literary writing. One is not inherently better or more effective than the other, and we obviously need both types of writing to do justice to all sides of life and truth. The commandment “you shall not kill” is expository in its approach to moral truth. The story of Cain and Abel (Gen. 4:1–16) embodies the same truth in the distinctly literary form of a story (a story that implies but nowhere states that it is sin to murder someone). When asked to define “neighbor,” Jesus avoided expository discourse and instead told a parable. Because literature aims to recreate a whole experience, there is a certain irreducible quality to it. We may be able to deduce ideas 

from a story or a poem, but those propositions are never an adequate substitute for the embodied vision that the literary work itself conveys. The whole story or the whole poem is the meaning because the truth that literature communicates is a living through of an experience. If the direct statement of an idea conveyed all that a story or poem does, the story or poem would be superfluous. But the stories and poems of the Bible are emphatically not superfluous.  The Need to Respect the Bible’s Experiential Quality  What does it mean to approach the Bible as literature? It means first of all to be sensitive to the experiential side of the Bible. It means to resist the tendency to turn every biblical passage into a theological proposition, as though this is what the passage exists for. The one thing that the Bible is not, may I repeat, is a theological outline with proof texts.  THE CONCRETENESS OF LITERATURE Concreteness in Biblical Poetry  The chief means by which literature communicates the very quality of human experience is concreteness. In literature we constantly en- counter the sights and sounds and vividness of real life. This is most easily seen in the poetry of the Bible. For the biblical poets, noth- ing remains wholly abstract. Longing for God becomes as tangible as thirst “in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Ps. 63:1). Slander is pictured as weapon-toting ambushers “who sharpen their tongues like swords/and aim their words like deadly arrows” (Ps. 64:3). Pride becomes a necklace and violence a garment (Ps. 73:6).  The Concreteness of Biblical Stories  The impulse toward concreteness is no less prominent in the stories of the Bible. Even to express truth in the form of people doing things in specific settings is to choose a concrete medium rather than the abstract form of expository writing. It is easy to deduce a dozen ideas from the Bible’s story of origins (Gen. 1–3) and to state these ideas as propositions, but the account itself almost totally avoids stating the truth about God and creation abstractly. It embodies everything in the concrete form of characters performing ac- tions and saying things that we overhear. Biblical stories exist on a continuum from a bare outline of what happened to a full account of how it happened. The more fully and concretely the story is told, the more literary we should consider it to be, and the stories of the Bible usually lean in the direction of lit- erary concreteness. Consider a random passage from the Book of Acts (3:1–5):  One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the time of prayer—at three in the afternoon. Now a man crippled from birth was being carried to the temple gate called Beautiful, where he was put every day to beg from those going into the temple courts. When he saw Peter and John about to enter, he asked them for money. Peter looked straight at him, as did John. Then Peter said, “Look at us!” So the man gave them his attention, expecting to get something from them. . . .  A television camera could not have captured the event more vividly than this. If the writer’s purpose were to state only what happened, there is a lot of excess baggage in the passage. But given the literary criterion of concreteness and vividness, the emphasis on how it happened is exactly what we should expect.  The Prominence of Dialogue in the Bible  We might also note in passing that one of the most distinctive traits of biblical writing, especially biblical stories, is the prevalence of direct speech and dialogue. Biblical storytellers are always busy quoting what characters said and giving us snatches of dialogue in- stead of indirect summaries of conversations. This, too, is part of the Bible’s literary vividness. What could be more actual and imme- diate than the very words a character used?  Concreteness in New Testament Epistles  The impulse toward concrete vividness is not limited to the poetry and stories of the Bible. We find it in the Epistles, for example, min- gled with the predominantly theological mode:  Endure hardship with us as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. ... An athlete . . . does not receive the victor’s crown unless he competes according to the rules. The hard-working farmer should be the first to receive a share of the crops (2 Tim. 2:3, 5–6).  Even the letter as a form is more experiential and literary, less systematic and expository, than an essay or sermon.  SUMMARY  At the level of content, biblical literature is characterized by experiential concreteness. It is filled with the settings and sensations and actions of everyday life. It incarnates ideas in the form of poetic images, stories of characters in action, and living situations in which readers can imaginatively participate. It appeals to the understanding through the imagination.  The Need to Be Imaginative Readers  What is the practical result of this concreteness? It means that we should read the Bible with our imaginations (image-making capacity) as well as with our reason. If we are to read the Bible as literature, we must be active in recreating the experiences and sensations and 

events it portrays. We must be sensitive to the physical and experiential qualities of a passage and avoid reducing every passage in the Bible to a set of abstract themes. If we have “antennae” only for theological concepts or historical facts, we will miss much of what the Bible communicates and will distort the kind of book it is.  The Importance of Images  The Bible appeals to our imagination and emotions as well as to our reason and intellect. It conveys more than abstract ideas because its aim is to express the whole of reality. The Bible recognizes that a person’s world view consists of images and symbols as well as ideas and propositions. A noted theologian has said that  we are far more image-making and image-using creatures than we usually think ourselves to be and . . . are guided and formed by images in our minds. . . . Man . . . is a being who grasps and shapes reality . . . with the aid of great images, metaphors, and analogies.⁴  There is no better illustration of this than the Bible, an authoritative religious book that conveys the truth about reality by means of sto- ries and characters and images and lifelike situations far oftener than by theological abstraction.  Truthfulness to Life and Reality  All of this affects how we should read the Bible. Reading the Bible as literature includes reading it for its ideas and implied assertions and themes, but it includes more than this. Literature conveys a sense of life—a sense of how the writer thinks and feels about what re- ally exists, what is right and wrong, what is valuable and worthless. Literature can be true to reality and human experience as well as being the embodiment of a true proposition. Literature is true whenever we can say about its portrayal of life, “This is the way life is.”  Reading the Bible to Absorb a Sense of Life  Reading biblical literature does not have to result in the intellectual grasp of an idea. We also read it to absorb or experience a sense of the way things truly are. In the parable of the good Samaritan, Jesus did not have to add a definition of “neighbor”; the meaning of the parable is complete if we recognize and experience the neighborly behavior of the Samaritan. This has big implications for what might be called the devotional reading of the Bible. The stories and poems of the Bible achieve their devotional purpose whenever they reinforce a reader’s general sense of the reality of God, or produce an awareness of what is moral and immoral, or influence a person’s estimate of what is valuable and worthless. We are affected by more than ideas when we read literature, though, of course, ideas are part of the total experience. We read literature not primarily to acquire information but to contemplate experience and reality as a way of under- standing them better. One of the rewards of reading literature, including the Bible, is that our own experiences and beliefs are given shape and expression. Traditional approaches to the Bible lean heavily toward the conceptual and doctrinal. We have erroneously operated on the premise that a person’s world view consists solely of abstract ideas—but it also includes stories and images. A literary approach to the Bible can go a long way toward respecting the other half of a person’s world view—and the other side of the brain, to use contemporary psy- chological theory. The Bible is more than a book into which we reach for proof texts. What would happen if, instead of tracing ideas through the Bible, we traced a single image, such as light or food or garment or rock? We would have covered an amazing range of bib- lical doctrine, in a manner completely in keeping with the kind of book the Bible is.  LITERATURE REQUIRES INTERPRETATION The Need to Interpret  From what I have already said it is easy to see why literature requires more of a reader than straightforward expository writing. Literature always calls for interpretation. It expresses its meanings by a certain indirection. The statement that “our neighbor is anyone whom we encounter in need of our help” is direct and requires no interpretation. By comparison, Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan requires a reader to determine what the details in the story add up to.  Interpreting Stories  The more concrete or complex a story is, the more open it becomes to interpretation. The story of David in the Old Testament illus- trates this. What does the story of David communicate about God, people, and society? There is, of course, no single answer, nor is it always easy to determine exactly what truth is communicated by this or that episode in the story. It is no wonder that the story of David has elicited so many interpretations.⁵  Interpreting Poetry  Biblical poetry also requires interpretation on the part of the reader. Consider, for example, the most important of all figures of speech: metaphor and simile. These figures of speech compare one thing to another: “He is like a tree planted by streams of water” (Ps. 1:3). Exactly how is the godly person like a tree? How many of the suggested points of comparison are valid? These are questions of interpre- tation that metaphor and simile always place before a reader.  Some Advantages of the Literary Approach  If the need to interpret literature and the unavoidable differences in interpretation from one reader to another strike us as a risk, we 

should also note the advantages of literature as a medium. They include memorability, ability to capture a reader’s attention, affective power, and ability to do justice to the complexity and multiplicity of human life as we actually experience it.  THE ARTISTRY OF LITERATURE Literature is an interpretive presentation of human experience. But it is more than that. It is also an art form, characterized by beau- ty, craftsmanship, and technique. Not merely what is said, but the how of a piece of writing is always important in literature.  The Elements of Artistic Form  The elements of artistic form that all types of literature (in fact, all art forms) 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. In stories these ingredients will take one form, in poems another, as subsequent chapters in this book will show. But whatever the genre (literary type), the sheer abundance of literary technique and artistry that we find in many parts of the Bible make it a literary masterpiece that we can enjoy for its beauty as well read for its truth. What the writer of Ecclesiastes said about his own theory of composition applies equally to most biblical writers: he labored, he tells us, to arrange his material “with great care,” and to “find pleasing words” or “words of delight” (Eccl. 12:9–10, RSV).  The Purposes of Artistry  What functions are served by this type of artistry? And why is it important to be aware of this dimension of the Bible? Artistic form serves the purpose of intensifying the impact of what is said, but also the purposes of pleasure, delight, and enjoyment. Artistry satis- fies the human urge for beauty and craftsmanship. If a person set out to spend some time every day reading in the so-called sacred books of the world, I can predict which one most people would grow least tired of reading. Literary analysis is capable of showing why the Bible is an interesting book rather than a dull book to read. A famous detractor of biblical religion called the Bible “unquestionably the most beautiful book in the world.”⁶  Reading with Artistic Sensitivity  What does the artistry of the Bible require of the reader? We need to be prepared to identify and enjoy the elements of literary form we find. A literary approach is sensitive to the artistic beauty of the Bible. It sees value in the craftsmanship of biblical writers. It relishes the stories and poems of the Bible as products of verbal and imaginative skill. That the Bible possesses such artistry is indisputable; the elements of artistic form and beauty I have mentioned are manifestly there. The only question is whether as readers we are prepared to recognize and enjoy the artistry. The artistic excellence of the Bible is not extraneous to its total effect. It is one of the glories of the Bible.  LITERARY GENRES Literary and Expository Genres  The commonest way of defining literature is by its genres, or literary types. Through the centuries, people have agreed that certain gen- res (such as story, poetry, and drama) are literary in nature. Other genres, such as historical chronicles, theological treatises, and ge- nealogies, are expository (informational) in nature. Still others fall into one or the other category, depending on how the writer handles them. Letters, sermons, and orations, for example, can move in the direction of literature if they display the elements of literature dis- cussed in this chapter.  The Importance of Genres  Each literary genre has its distinctive features. Each has its own “rules” or procedures. This, in turn, affects how we read and interpret a work of literature. As readers we need to come to a given text with the right expectations. If we do, we will see more than we otherwise would, and we will avoid misreadings. If we know that stories are built around a central conflict leading to final resolution, we are in a position to see something that the writer has built into the story. Literary genre is nothing less than a “norm or expectation to guide the reader in his encounter with the text.”⁷ An awareness of genre will program our reading of a work, giving it a familiar shape and arrang- ing the details into an identifiable pattern. Knowing how a given genre works can spare us from misinterpretations. For example, exaggeration in a story that purports to be factual history is a form of untruth, while that same type of exaggeration in lyric poetry is called hyperbole and is a standard way of ex- pressing emotional truth. The reliability of documentary history depends partly on the writer’s inclusion of all the relevant historical material, but as interpreters we realize that literary narrative is much more selective and interpretive, incorporating material only to highlight the specific perspective a storyteller wishes to give to a character or event. How important is the notion of genre to literature and the Bible? Two biblical scholars answer that question at the beginning of a book on biblical interpretation:  . . . the basic concern of this book is with the understanding of the different types of literature (the genres) that make up the Bible. Although we do speak to other issues, this generic approach has controlled all that has been done.⁸  A literary approach to the Bible agrees with this emphasis on literary genres, though it does not find the list of genres discussed by bib- lical scholars to be wholly adequate, nor is it totally satisfied with the scholars’ descriptions of literary genres.  

The Literary Genres of the Bible  The Bible is a mixture of genres, some literary, some expository, some mixed. The major literary genres are narrative or story, poetry (especially lyric poetry), proverb, and visionary writing (including prophecy and apocalypse). Historical writing in the Bible frequently moves in the direction of literary narrative by virtue of its experiential concreteness or the principles of pattern and design that per- meate such writing. The epistles of the New Testament frequently become literary because their style is either poetic or artistic or both, and biblical satire usually employs a literary vehicle to communicate its attacks. The Bible also has its share of genres that are either unique or decidedly hybrid, but these are sufficiently similar to familiar literary genres to yield their meanings if approached with literary tools. Biblical prophecy, for example, requires an ability to interpret poetry and satire. Biblical apocalypse is not a typical story, nor is it ordinary poetry, yet narrative and poetry are exactly the right categories with which to approach the Book of Revelation.  LITERATURE AS A SPECIAL USE OF LANGUAGE Literary Language  Literature uses special resources of language in a way that people through the centuries have agreed to call literary. This quality cuts across literary genres and, in fact, appears in texts that we would not consider to be primarily literary. Literature exploits, for example, such devices of language as metaphor, simile, allusion, pun, paradox, and irony. Of course, these resources of language are the very essence of poetry, but the important thing about the Bible is that they appear everywhere, not just in the poetry. This is why, incidentally, a literary approach is necessary throughout the Bible and not just in the predominantly literary parts.  Literary Language in Biblical Stories  The story of Cain’s murder of Abel (Gen. 4:1–16) illustrates how the stories of the Bible can use figurative language that we recognize as distinctly literary. When Cain becomes angry at his brother, God warns him that “sin is crouching at your door” (v. 7). This state- ment is an example of personification in which an abstract moral quality is figuratively treated as a person or animal. Biblical scholars disagree on whether sin is pictured here as “couching” or “crouching” at the door, but in either case we have to interpret the statement figuratively: sin is either a monster waiting to pounce on Cain if he does not get control of his anger, or it is a monster that, through long acquaintance, has become a familiar part of the household. Later in the same story God tells Cain, “Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. . .which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand” (vv. 10–11). This, too, is figurative and an obvious deviation from normal language. It shows that even in nonpoetic parts of the Bible the writers use literary and poetic resources of language. As readers we need to identify and inter- pret figurative language throughout the Bible. Indeed, there is no book of the Bible that is not partly literary.  Literary Language in Epistles  This is true even of the most explicitly theological parts of the New Testament Epistles. Consider the following specimen:  Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord (Eph. 2:19–21).  The passage is thoroughly theological, but the language is poetic. Almost everything is expressed through metaphors: an unbeliever is an exile, a believer is a citizen and family member, Christians are a church building, and so on. It is hard to find a page in the Bible that does not make at least some use of the resources of language that are distinctly literary.  Rhetorical Patterns in the Bible  Not only individual words and images but also larger rhetorical patterns are a pervasive literary presence in the Bible. Examples include parallelism (two or more consecutive clauses arranged in similar grammatical form), rhetorical questions, question-and-answer con- structions, imaginary dialogues, the aphoristic conciseness of a proverb, and any highly patterned arrangement of clauses or phrases (such as the intricate system of threes in 1 Cor. 13). A biblical scholar has analyzed the presence of “tensive language,” or “forceful and imaginative language,” in the New Testament; he shows how such language uses rhetorical devices to break through the clichés of ordinary language and to reveal truth with power.⁹ Such literary resources pervade the entire Bible, even the sections that are not pre- dominantly literary.  MEANING THROUGH FORM The Primacy of Form in the Bible  A literary approach to the Bible is preoccupied with literary form, and that for a very good reason. In any written discourse, meaning is communicated through form. The concept of “form” should be construed very broadly in this context: it includes anything that touches upon how a writer has expressed his content. Everything that gets communicated does so through form, beginning with language itself.  Literature Uses Unique Forms to Communicate Meaning  

While this is true for all forms 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. The result is that before we can understand what a story says 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 (metaphor, simile, image, etc.).  Form and Content Are Inseparable  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 from how it is said, content from form.  LOOKING FOR LITERARY WHOLES The Importance of Unity  The most basic of all artistic principles is unity. The literary approach to the Bible accordingly looks for literary patterns and wholeness of effect. Richard G. Moulton, pioneer of the literary approach to the Bible, wrote, “No principle of literary study is more important than that of grasping clearly a literary work as a single whole.”¹⁰ This literary preoccupation with the overall unity and pattern of biblical works stands in contrast to traditional approaches. Austin Farrar, a biblical scholar with excellent literary intuitions, criticizes his own discipline on precisely this point:  Form-criticism [as practiced by biblical scholars] is rather misleadingly so called, because the name suggests an attempt to appre- ciate the form of a complete literary unit, say St Mark’s Gospel. Whereas what form-criticism studies is the form of the small con- stituent parts of the Gospels; anecdotal paragraphs, for example, or even such small details as apparently self-contained gnomic sentences. . . . In the literary realm, . . . the pattern of the whole comes first.¹¹  Traditional and Literary Approaches Contrasted  The tendency of biblical scholars to divide a biblical text into pieces has taken two forms. One is the penchant of liberal scholars for undertaking textual “excavations” in an attempt to determine the various strata in the development of a text from its original form to its final written form. The other is the practice of conservative scholars to organize the Bible into a theological outline and then treat var- ious verses or passages as proof texts. Both procedures end up dividing a text into fragments, as does the verse-by-verse commentary that is such a staple of biblical scholarship. The literary approach to the Bible, by contrast, accepts the biblical text in its final form as the focus of study. It assumes unity in a text. The resultant ability to see the overall pattern of a story or poem is one of the greatest gifts that a literary approach confers.  SUMMARY  The Bible demands a literary approach because its writing is literary in nature. The Bible is an experiential book that conveys the con- crete reality of human life. It is filled with evidences of literary artistry and beauty, much of it in the form of literary genres. It also makes continuous use of resources of language that we can regard as literary. A literary approach pays close attention to all of these elements of literary form, because it is through them that the Bible communicates its message. The literary approach to the Bible is becoming increasingly popular among both biblical and literary scholars. Traditional ap- proaches to the Bible seem to have reached something of an impasse.¹² Given the literary nature of the Bible, it is not surprising that biblical scholars are turning to the methods of literary criticism as a way of understanding and discussing the Bible. “I would hope,” writes one of them, “that the new approaches will remain as receptive to lit- erary analysis as they are at the present time. . . . It may well be—and I regard this as highly desirable—that biblical literary criticism will be deparochialized and reintegrated with non-religious literary criticism in the future.”¹³ “Literary criticism is not. . . just the latest fad- dish approach,” writes another; “it represents a significant shift in perspective. . . .”¹⁴ My purpose in the pages that follow is to make the methods of literary criticism more accessible to anyone who reads and studies the Bible.  Further Reading In keeping with the focus of the opening chapter, the sources that I list here deal in a theoretical way with what it means to approach the Bible as literature. I must sound a note of warning in regard to sources that are sometimes included in lists such as this. Not every- thing that claims to be a literary approach to the Bible actually is; in fact, most of what has been written to date has not been a genuinely literary approach. An immense quantity of literary criticism of the Bible has been collected in companion volumes to be published as part of Frederick Ungar’s Library of Literary Criticism series; the editors are Alex Preminger and Edward L. Greenstein for the Old Testament and Leland Ryken for the New Testament. The sources listed in another reference book, J. H. Gottcenťs The Bible as Literature: A Selective Bibli- ography (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979), are a mixed group, more indicative of the methods of biblical scholarship than of literary criticism. Examples of biblical scholars whose theory of biblical analysis is essentially literary include William A. Beardslee, Literary Criticism of the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970); Amos N. Wilder, Early Christian Rhetoric: The Language of the Gospel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), and Jesus’ Parables and the War of Myths: Essays on Imagination in the Scripture, ed. James Breech (Phila- delphia: Fortress, 1982); Robert C. Tannehill, The Sword of His Mouth: Forceful and Imaginative Language in Synoptic Sayings 

==

Chapter One 

Is the Bible Literature? 

 

New Directions in Biblical Studies 

THERE IS A QUIET REVOLUTION GOING ON in the study of the Bible. At its center is a growing awareness that the Bible is a work of liter- 

ature and that the methods of literary scholarship are a necessary part of any complete study of the Bible. There are two sides to the 

movement: literary scholars are showing increasing interest in applying their methods to the Bible, and Bible scholars are calling for a 

literary approach.¹ 

A number of ingredients make up this new approach to the Bible: a concern with the literary genres of the Bible; a new willingness to 

treat biblical texts as finished wholes instead of as a patchwork of fragments; a focus on the Bible as it now stands instead of con- 

ducting excavations in the redaction (editing) process behind the text; an inclination to use literary instead of traditional theological 

terms to discuss the stories and poems of the Bible; an appreciation for the artistry of the Bible; a sensitivity to the experiential, extra- 

intellectual (more-than-ideational) dimension of the Bible. 

 

Approaching the Bible as Literature 

 

But above all, the new attitude toward the Bible involves a growing awareness that literature expresses truth in its own way, different 

from ordinary propositional discourse. In other words, when the Bible employs a literary method, it asks to be approached as literature 

and not as something else. In the words of C. S. Lewis, “There is a . . . sense in which the Bible, since it is after all literature, cannot 

properly be read except as literature; and the different parts of it as the different sorts of literature they are.”² 

 

Defining the Term “Literature” 

 

The purpose of this opening chapter is to identify what makes a text “literature.” I should say at once that by the term “literature” I do 

not mean everything that is written. I use it in a more restricted sense to mean the types of writing that are often called “imaginative 

literature” or “creative writing,” in contrast to expository writing. In this chapter, I am in effect defining those parts of the Bible that are 

like the works covered in high school and college literature courses. 

 

The Literary Continuum 

 

By thus defining literature I am not establishing an “either-or” method of distinguishing between literary and nonliterary texts. The Bible 

is obviously a mixed book. Literary and nonliterary (expository, explanatory) writing exist side by side within the covers of this unique 

book. I have no intention of building a “great divide” that would make a biblical passage either literature or nonliterature. Instead, I am 

describing a continuum, or scale, on which some parts of the Bible are more literary and other parts are less literary. 

 

More Than One Approach Is Necessary 

 

Nor do I wish to suggest that the literary parts of the Bible cannot be approached in other ways as well. I do not question that the lit- 

erary parts can and should also be approached as history and theology. My claim is simply that the literary approach is one necessary 

way to read and interpret the Bible, an approach that has been unjustifiably neglected. 

 

Building on Biblical Scholarship 

 

Despite that neglect, the literary approach builds at every turn on what biblical scholars have done to recover the original, intended 

meaning of the biblical text. In fact, the literary approach that I describe in this book is a logical extension of what is commonly known 

as the grammatico-historical method of biblical interpretation. Both approaches insist that we must begin with the literal meaning of 

the words of the Bible as determined by the historical setting in which the authors wrote. 

 

The Parable of the Good Samaritan 

 

The best way into the subject is to look at a couple of examples. One of the most memorable passages in the whole Bible is the parable 

Jesus told when a lawyer asked him to define who his neighbor was. Here is the definition of “neighbor” that Jesus gave (Luke 10:30– 

36): 

 

A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat 

him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he 

passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, 

as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, 

pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took 

out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. “Look after him,” he said, “and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra 

expense you may have.” Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers? 

 

The Incarnational Nature of Literature 

 

Everything about this passage makes it a piece of literature. We should notice first that Jesus never gives an abstract or propositional 

definition of “neighbor.” Instead, he tells a story that embodies what it means to be a neighbor. This suggests at once the most impor- 

tant thing about literature: its subject matter is human experience, not abstract ideas. Literature incarnates its meanings as concretely as 

possible. The knowledge that literature gives of a subject is the kind of knowledge that is obtained by (vicariously) living through an 

experience. Jesus could have defined neighbor abstractly, as a dictionary does, but he chose a literary approach to the truth instead. This 

is comparable to an experience we probably have all had when struggling with the assembly of a toy or appliance: when we have a good 

picture, we may not even need the written instructions. 

 

The Primacy of Imagination (Image-Making) 

 

Because literature presents an experience instead of telling us about that experience, it constantly appeals to our imagination (the image- 

making and image-perceiving capacity within us). Literature images forth some aspect of reality. Consider all the sensory images and 

gestures we encounter in this parable: robbers stripping and beating a victim on a road, specific people traveling down the road, first- 

aid equipment consisting of such tangibles as oil and wine, and such physical things as a donkey and an inn and money. We visualize 

the Samaritan lifting the victim onto his donkey and see the money exchange hands and listen to the instructions at the inn. 

 

The Genre of Story 

 

The form of the parable is as literary as the content is. For one thing, it is a story or narrative, and this is a distinctly literary genre 

(“type”). The story, moreover, is told with an abundance of literary artistry. It follows the storytelling principle of threefold repetition: a 

given event happens three times, with a crucial change introduced the third time. The story begins with vivid plot conflict to seize the 

listener’s attention, and from the very start the story generates suspense about its outcome. Jesus also makes skillful use of foils (con- 

trasts that “set off” or heighten the main point of the story): the neighborliness of the Samaritan stands out all the more clearly by its 

contrast with the indifference of the priest and of the Levite. 

 

Unity, Coherence, Emphasis 

 

Well-constructed stories have unity, coherence, and emphasis. Judged by these artistic criteria, this parable of Jesus is a small master- 

piece. Nothing is extraneous to the unifying theme of neighborly behavior from an unlikely source. The very construction of the story 

makes the emphasis fall on the good Samaritan. One critic describes it thus: 

 

The aborted sequences with the priest and Levite provide a pattern which causes the listener to anticipate the third traveler and 

build up tension. Since this threefold pattern is so common in popular story telling, we also anticipate that the third traveler will be 

the one who will actually help. Our attention is focused on the third traveler before he arrives, and this heightens the shock when we 

discover that he neither fits the pattern of cultural expectation nor the pattern of expectation created by the series of priest, Levite.³ 

 

Reader Involvement 

 

Not only is the parable inherently literary; its effect on the reader is also literary. The story does not primarily require our minds to grasp 

an idea but instead gets us to respond with our imagination and emotions to a real-life experience. It puts us on the scene and makes 

us participants in the action. It gets us involved with characters about whose destiny we are made to care. Literature, in short, is 

affective, not cool and detached. This, of course, made it such an effective teaching medium for Jesus, whose parables often drew his 

listeners innocently into the story and then turned the tables on them after it was too late to evade the issue at hand. 

 

SUMMARY 

 

What makes the parable of the good Samaritan a work of literature? Everything about it: its experiential approach to truth, its sensory 

concreteness, its narrative genre, its carefully crafted construction, and its total involvement of the reader—intellectually, emotionally, 

imaginatively. 

 

Psalm 23 as a Literary Work 

 

As Exhibit B, we consider the world’s greatest poem, Psalm 23 (RSV): 

 

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; 

he makes me lie down in green pastures. 

He leads me beside still waters; 

he restores my soul. 

He leads me in paths of righteousness [right paths] 

for his name’s sake. 

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, 

I fear no evil; 

for thou art with me; 

thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. 

Thou preparest a table before me 

in the presence of my enemies; 

thou anointest my head with oil, 

my cup overflows. 

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me 

all the days of my life; 

and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord 

for ever. 

 

The Genre of Poetry 

 

What indicates that this is literary writing? We can tell at a glance that this is poetry, another distinctly literary genre. The recurring unit 

is the poetic line, not the sentence. Furthermore, nearly every line follows the same grammatical pattern (God is identified as the actor, 

and then an action is ascribed to him), and many of the sentences fall into a pattern of pairs in which the second repeats the thought of 

the first in different words. In short, Psalm 23 is written in a verse form known as parallelism. It possesses a memorable, aphoristic 

quality that ordinary discourse lacks. 

 

Unity and Shapeliness 

 

There is equal artistry in the unity and shapeliness of the poem as a whole. The poem begins by announcing the theme and the control- 

ling metaphor (the sheep-shepherd relationship). It then proceeds to a catalog of the shepherd’s acts on behalf of his sheep, from the 

noontime resting in the shade to the activities performed in the sheepfold at the end of the day. And the poem ends with a forward- 

pointing note of finality. Psalm 23 has a self-contained, carefully crafted quality that we associate with art. 

 

Literary Concreteness 

 

Turning from the form to the content, we again sense how literary this text is. We see once more the literary impulse to be concrete in- 

stead of abstract. Psalm 23 takes God’s providence as its subject. But the psalmist does not use the word providence and does not give 

us a theological definition of the concept. To drive this point home, we might contrast the literary approach of Psalm 23 with the theo- 

logical definition of providence in the Westminster Confession of Faith: 

 

God the Creator of all things doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to 

the least, by His most wise and holy providence. . . . 

 

The approach of Psalm 23 is the opposite. It turns the idea of God’s providence into a metaphor in which God is pictured as a shep- 

herd in the daily routine of caring for his sheep. The literary approach of Psalm 23 is indirect: first we must picture what the shepherd 

does for his sheep, and then we must transfer that picture to the human level. Instead of using abstract, theological terminology, Psalm 

23 consistently keeps us in a world of concrete images: green pastures, water, pathways, rod and staff, table, oil, cup, and sheepfold 

(metaphorically called a house). 

 

The Differentia of Literature 

 

How does literature work? Psalm 23 again shows us. Literature is concrete and experiential. It uses tangible images to convey the very 

quality of lived experience. It appeals to our imagination (image-making capacity). It conveys more meanings than ordinary expository 

language does—it would take several pages of expository prose to paraphrase all the meanings Psalm 23 compresses into nineteen 

lines. Psalm 23 is more concentrated, more consistently concrete, more obviously artistic, more eloquent and beautiful, than ordinary 

prose discourse. 

The parable of the good Samaritan and Psalm 23 are typical of the kind of literary writing we keep running into as we read through 

the Bible. From these two examples I wish to branch out into a more systematic anatomy of the principles that underlie a literary ap- 

proach to the Bible. 

 

LITERATURE: THE VOICE OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE 

The Subject of Literature: Human Experience 

 

It is a commonplace that the subject of literature is human experience—not abstract ideas or propositions, but experience. The knowl- 

edge or truth that literature gives us is an awareness of reality or truth as it is actually experienced. 

Literature, in other words, shows human experience instead of telling about it. It is incarnational. It enacts rather than states. Instead 

of giving us abstract propositions about virtue or vice, for example, literature presents stories of good or evil characters in action. The 

tendency of literature is to embody human experience, not to formulate ideas in intellectual propositions. 

 

The Difference Between Literary and Expository Writing 

 

We can profitably contrast the literary and the expository, or documentary, use of language. Expository (“explanatory”) writing seeks to 

tell us, as objectively and clearly as possible, facts and information about a subject. Literature, by contrast, appeals to our imagination. 

Literature aims to recreate an experience or situation in sufficient detail and concreteness to enable the reader to relive it. 

The Bible contains an abundance of both expository and literary writing. One is not inherently better or more effective than the 

other, and we obviously need both types of writing to do justice to all sides of life and truth. The commandment “you shall not kill” is 

expository in its approach to moral truth. The story of Cain and Abel (Gen. 4:1–16) embodies the same truth in the distinctly literary 

form of a story (a story that implies but nowhere states that it is sin to murder someone). When asked to define “neighbor,” Jesus 

avoided expository discourse and instead told a parable. 

Because literature aims to recreate a whole experience, there is a certain irreducible quality to it. We may be able to deduce ideas 

from a story or a poem, but those propositions are never an adequate substitute for the embodied vision that the literary work itself 

conveys. The whole story or the whole poem is the meaning because the truth that literature communicates is a living through of an 

experience. If the direct statement of an idea conveyed all that a story or poem does, the story or poem would be superfluous. But the 

stories and poems of the Bible are emphatically not superfluous. 

 

The Need to Respect the Bible’s Experiential Quality 

 

What does it mean to approach the Bible as literature? It means first of all to be sensitive to the experiential side of the Bible. It means 

to resist the tendency to turn every biblical passage into a theological proposition, as though this is what the passage exists for. The 

one thing that the Bible is not, may I repeat, is a theological outline with proof texts. 

 

THE CONCRETENESS OF LITERATURE 

Concreteness in Biblical Poetry 

 

The chief means by which literature communicates the very quality of human experience is concreteness. In literature we constantly en- 

counter the sights and sounds and vividness of real life. This is most easily seen in the poetry of the Bible. For the biblical poets, noth- 

ing remains wholly abstract. Longing for God becomes as tangible as thirst “in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Ps. 63:1). 

Slander is pictured as weapon-toting ambushers “who sharpen their tongues like swords/and aim their words like deadly arrows” (Ps. 

64:3). Pride becomes a necklace and violence a garment (Ps. 73:6). 

 

The Concreteness of Biblical Stories 

 

The impulse toward concreteness is no less prominent in the stories of the Bible. Even to express truth in the form of people doing 

things in specific settings is to choose a concrete medium rather than the abstract form of expository writing. It is easy to deduce a 

dozen ideas from the Bible’s story of origins (Gen. 1–3) and to state these ideas as propositions, but the account itself almost totally 

avoids stating the truth about God and creation abstractly. It embodies everything in the concrete form of characters performing ac- 

tions and saying things that we overhear. 

Biblical stories exist on a continuum from a bare outline of what happened to a full account of how it happened. The more fully and 

concretely the story is told, the more literary we should consider it to be, and the stories of the Bible usually lean in the direction of lit- 

erary concreteness. Consider a random passage from the Book of Acts (3:1–5): 

 

One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the time of prayer—at three in the afternoon. Now a man crippled from 

birth was being carried to the temple gate called Beautiful, where he was put every day to beg from those going into the temple 

courts. When he saw Peter and John about to enter, he asked them for money. Peter looked straight at him, as did John. Then Peter 

said, “Look at us!” So the man gave them his attention, expecting to get something from them. . . . 

 

A television camera could not have captured the event more vividly than this. If the writer’s purpose were to state only what happened, 

there is a lot of excess baggage in the passage. But given the literary criterion of concreteness and vividness, the emphasis on how it 

happened is exactly what we should expect. 

 

The Prominence of Dialogue in the Bible 

 

We might also note in passing that one of the most distinctive traits of biblical writing, especially biblical stories, is the prevalence of 

direct speech and dialogue. Biblical storytellers are always busy quoting what characters said and giving us snatches of dialogue in- 

stead of indirect summaries of conversations. This, too, is part of the Bible’s literary vividness. What could be more actual and imme- 

diate than the very words a character used? 

 

Concreteness in New Testament Epistles 

 

The impulse toward concrete vividness is not limited to the poetry and stories of the Bible. We find it in the Epistles, for example, min- 

gled with the predominantly theological mode: 

 

Endure hardship with us as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. ... An athlete . . . does not receive the victor’s crown unless he competes 

according to the rules. The hard-working farmer should be the first to receive a share of the crops (2 Tim. 2:3, 5–6). 

 

Even the letter as a form is more experiential and literary, less systematic and expository, than an essay or sermon. 

 

SUMMARY 

 

At the level of content, biblical literature is characterized by experiential concreteness. It is filled with the settings and sensations and 

actions of everyday life. It incarnates ideas in the form of poetic images, stories of characters in action, and living situations in which 

readers can imaginatively participate. It appeals to the understanding through the imagination. 

 

The Need to Be Imaginative Readers 

 

What is the practical result of this concreteness? It means that we should read the Bible with our imaginations (image-making capacity) 

as well as with our reason. If we are to read the Bible as literature, we must be active in recreating the experiences and sensations and 

events it portrays. We must be sensitive to the physical and experiential qualities of a passage and avoid reducing every passage in the 

Bible to a set of abstract themes. If we have “antennae” only for theological concepts or historical facts, we will miss much of what the 

Bible communicates and will distort the kind of book it is. 

 

The Importance of Images 

 

The Bible appeals to our imagination and emotions as well as to our reason and intellect. It conveys more than abstract ideas because 

its aim is to express the whole of reality. The Bible recognizes that a person’s world view consists of images and symbols as well as 

ideas and propositions. A noted theologian has said that 

 

we are far more image-making and image-using creatures than we usually think ourselves to be and . . . are guided and formed by 

images in our minds. . . . Man . . . is a being who grasps and shapes reality . . . with the aid of great images, metaphors, and 

analogies.⁴ 

 

There is no better illustration of this than the Bible, an authoritative religious book that conveys the truth about reality by means of sto- 

ries and characters and images and lifelike situations far oftener than by theological abstraction. 

 

Truthfulness to Life and Reality 

 

All of this affects how we should read the Bible. Reading the Bible as literature includes reading it for its ideas and implied assertions 

and themes, but it includes more than this. Literature conveys a sense of life—a sense of how the writer thinks and feels about what re- 

ally exists, what is right and wrong, what is valuable and worthless. Literature can be true to reality and human experience as well as 

being the embodiment of a true proposition. Literature is true whenever we can say about its portrayal of life, “This is the way life is.” 

 

Reading the Bible to Absorb a Sense of Life 

 

Reading biblical literature does not have to result in the intellectual grasp of an idea. We also read it to absorb or experience a sense of 

the way things truly are. In the parable of the good Samaritan, Jesus did not have to add a definition of “neighbor”; the meaning of the 

parable is complete if we recognize and experience the neighborly behavior of the Samaritan. This has big implications for what might be 

called the devotional reading of the Bible. The stories and poems of the Bible achieve their devotional purpose whenever they reinforce 

a reader’s general sense of the reality of God, or produce an awareness of what is moral and immoral, or influence a person’s estimate 

of what is valuable and worthless. We are affected by more than ideas when we read literature, though, of course, ideas are part of the 

total experience. We read literature not primarily to acquire information but to contemplate experience and reality as a way of under- 

standing them better. One of the rewards of reading literature, including the Bible, is that our own experiences and beliefs are given 

shape and expression. 

Traditional approaches to the Bible lean heavily toward the conceptual and doctrinal. We have erroneously operated on the premise 

that a person’s world view consists solely of abstract ideas—but it also includes stories and images. A literary approach to the Bible 

can go a long way toward respecting the other half of a person’s world view—and the other side of the brain, to use contemporary psy- 

chological theory. The Bible is more than a book into which we reach for proof texts. What would happen if, instead of tracing ideas 

through the Bible, we traced a single image, such as light or food or garment or rock? We would have covered an amazing range of bib- 

lical doctrine, in a manner completely in keeping with the kind of book the Bible is. 

 

LITERATURE REQUIRES INTERPRETATION 

The Need to Interpret 

 

From what I have already said it is easy to see why literature requires more of a reader than straightforward expository writing. Literature 

always calls for interpretation. It expresses its meanings by a certain indirection. The statement that “our neighbor is anyone whom we 

encounter in need of our help” is direct and requires no interpretation. By comparison, Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan requires a 

reader to determine what the details in the story add up to. 

 

Interpreting Stories 

 

The more concrete or complex a story is, the more open it becomes to interpretation. The story of David in the Old Testament illus- 

trates this. What does the story of David communicate about God, people, and society? There is, of course, no single answer, nor is it 

always easy to determine exactly what truth is communicated by this or that episode in the story. It is no wonder that the story of David 

has elicited so many interpretations.⁵ 

 

Interpreting Poetry 

 

Biblical poetry also requires interpretation on the part of the reader. Consider, for example, the most important of all figures of speech: 

metaphor and simile. These figures of speech compare one thing to another: “He is like a tree planted by streams of water” (Ps. 1:3). 

Exactly how is the godly person like a tree? How many of the suggested points of comparison are valid? These are questions of interpre- 

tation that metaphor and simile always place before a reader. 

 

Some Advantages of the Literary Approach 

 

If the need to interpret literature and the unavoidable differences in interpretation from one reader to another strike us as a risk, we 

should also note the advantages of literature as a medium. They include memorability, ability to capture a reader’s attention, affective 

power, and ability to do justice to the complexity and multiplicity of human life as we actually experience it. 

 

THE ARTISTRY OF LITERATURE 

Literature is an interpretive presentation of human experience. But it is more than that. It is also an art form, characterized by beau- 

ty, craftsmanship, and technique. Not merely what is said, but the how of a piece of writing is always important in literature. 

 

The Elements of Artistic Form 

 

The elements of artistic form that all types of literature (in fact, all art forms) 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. In stories these ingredients will take one form, in poems another, as subsequent chapters in this 

book will show. But whatever the genre (literary type), the sheer abundance of literary technique and artistry that we find in many parts 

of the Bible make it a literary masterpiece that we can enjoy for its beauty as well read for its truth. What the writer of Ecclesiastes said 

about his own theory of composition applies equally to most biblical writers: he labored, he tells us, to arrange his material “with great 

care,” and to “find pleasing words” or “words of delight” (Eccl. 12:9–10, RSV). 

 

The Purposes of Artistry 

 

What functions are served by this type of artistry? And why is it important to be aware of this dimension of the Bible? Artistic form 

serves the purpose of intensifying the impact of what is said, but also the purposes of pleasure, delight, and enjoyment. Artistry satis- 

fies the human urge for beauty and craftsmanship. If a person set out to spend some time every day reading in the so-called sacred 

books of the world, I can predict which one most people would grow least tired of reading. Literary analysis is capable of showing why 

the Bible is an interesting book rather than a dull book to read. A famous detractor of biblical religion called the Bible “unquestionably 

the most beautiful book in the world.”⁶ 

 

Reading with Artistic Sensitivity 

 

What does the artistry of the Bible require of the reader? We need to be prepared to identify and enjoy the elements of literary form we 

find. A literary approach is sensitive to the artistic beauty of the Bible. It sees value in the craftsmanship of biblical writers. It relishes 

the stories and poems of the Bible as products of verbal and imaginative skill. That the Bible possesses such artistry is indisputable; 

the elements of artistic form and beauty I have mentioned are manifestly there. The only question is whether as readers we are prepared 

to recognize and enjoy the artistry. The artistic excellence of the Bible is not extraneous to its total effect. It is one of the glories of the 

Bible. 

 

LITERARY GENRES 

Literary and Expository Genres 

 

The commonest way of defining literature is by its genres, or literary types. Through the centuries, people have agreed that certain gen- 

res (such as story, poetry, and drama) are literary in nature. Other genres, such as historical chronicles, theological treatises, and ge- 

nealogies, are expository (informational) in nature. Still others fall into one or the other category, depending on how the writer handles 

them. Letters, sermons, and orations, for example, can move in the direction of literature if they display the elements of literature dis- 

cussed in this chapter. 

 

The Importance of Genres 

 

Each literary genre has its distinctive features. Each has its own “rules” or procedures. This, in turn, affects how we read and interpret a 

work of literature. As readers we need to come to a given text with the right expectations. If we do, we will see more than we otherwise 

would, and we will avoid misreadings. If we know that stories are built around a central conflict leading to final resolution, we are in a 

position to see something that the writer has built into the story. Literary genre is nothing less than a “norm or expectation to guide the 

reader in his encounter with the text.”⁷ An awareness of genre will program our reading of a work, giving it a familiar shape and arrang- 

ing the details into an identifiable pattern. 

Knowing how a given genre works can spare us from misinterpretations. For example, exaggeration in a story that purports to be 

factual history is a form of untruth, while that same type of exaggeration in lyric poetry is called hyperbole and is a standard way of ex- 

pressing emotional truth. The reliability of documentary history depends partly on the writer’s inclusion of all the relevant historical 

material, but as interpreters we realize that literary narrative is much more selective and interpretive, incorporating material only to 

highlight the specific perspective a storyteller wishes to give to a character or event. 

How important is the notion of genre to literature and the Bible? Two biblical scholars answer that question at the beginning of a 

book on biblical interpretation: 

 

. . . the basic concern of this book is with the understanding of the different types of literature (the genres) that make up the Bible. 

Although we do speak to other issues, this generic approach has controlled all that has been done.⁸ 

 

A literary approach to the Bible agrees with this emphasis on literary genres, though it does not find the list of genres discussed by bib- 

lical scholars to be wholly adequate, nor is it totally satisfied with the scholars’ descriptions of literary genres. 

 

The Literary Genres of the Bible 

 

The Bible is a mixture of genres, some literary, some expository, some mixed. The major literary genres are narrative or story, poetry 

(especially lyric poetry), proverb, and visionary writing (including prophecy and apocalypse). Historical writing in the Bible frequently 

moves in the direction of literary narrative by virtue of its experiential concreteness or the principles of pattern and design that per- 

meate such writing. The epistles of the New Testament frequently become literary because their style is either poetic or artistic or both, 

and biblical satire usually employs a literary vehicle to communicate its attacks. 

The Bible also has its share of genres that are either unique or decidedly hybrid, but these are sufficiently similar to familiar literary 

genres to yield their meanings if approached with literary tools. Biblical prophecy, for example, requires an ability to interpret poetry 

and satire. Biblical apocalypse is not a typical story, nor is it ordinary poetry, yet narrative and poetry are exactly the right categories with 

which to approach the Book of Revelation. 

 

LITERATURE AS A SPECIAL USE OF LANGUAGE 

Literary Language 

 

Literature uses special resources of language in a way that people through the centuries have agreed to call literary. This quality cuts 

across literary genres and, in fact, appears in texts that we would not consider to be primarily literary. 

Literature exploits, for example, such devices of language as metaphor, simile, allusion, pun, paradox, and irony. Of course, these 

resources of language are the very essence of poetry, but the important thing about the Bible is that they appear everywhere, not just in 

the poetry. This is why, incidentally, a literary approach is necessary throughout the Bible and not just in the predominantly literary 

parts. 

 

Literary Language in Biblical Stories 

 

The story of Cain’s murder of Abel (Gen. 4:1–16) illustrates how the stories of the Bible can use figurative language that we recognize 

as distinctly literary. When Cain becomes angry at his brother, God warns him that “sin is crouching at your door” (v. 7). This state- 

ment is an example of personification in which an abstract moral quality is figuratively treated as a person or animal. Biblical scholars 

disagree on whether sin is pictured here as “couching” or “crouching” at the door, but in either case we have to interpret the statement 

figuratively: sin is either a monster waiting to pounce on Cain if he does not get control of his anger, or it is a monster that, through 

long acquaintance, has become a familiar part of the household. 

Later in the same story God tells Cain, “Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. . .which opened its mouth to receive 

your brother’s blood from your hand” (vv. 10–11). This, too, is figurative and an obvious deviation from normal language. It shows that 

even in nonpoetic parts of the Bible the writers use literary and poetic resources of language. As readers we need to identify and inter- 

pret figurative language throughout the Bible. Indeed, there is no book of the Bible that is not partly literary. 

 

Literary Language in Epistles 

 

This is true even of the most explicitly theological parts of the New Testament Epistles. Consider the following specimen: 

 

Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, 

built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building 

is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord (Eph. 2:19–21). 

 

The passage is thoroughly theological, but the language is poetic. Almost everything is expressed through metaphors: an unbeliever is 

an exile, a believer is a citizen and family member, Christians are a church building, and so on. It is hard to find a page in the Bible that 

does not make at least some use of the resources of language that are distinctly literary. 

 

Rhetorical Patterns in the Bible 

 

Not only individual words and images but also larger rhetorical patterns are a pervasive literary presence in the Bible. Examples include 

parallelism (two or more consecutive clauses arranged in similar grammatical form), rhetorical questions, question-and-answer con- 

structions, imaginary dialogues, the aphoristic conciseness of a proverb, and any highly patterned arrangement of clauses or phrases 

(such as the intricate system of threes in 1 Cor. 13). A biblical scholar has analyzed the presence of “tensive language,” or “forceful and 

imaginative language,” in the New Testament; he shows how such language uses rhetorical devices to break through the clichés of 

ordinary language and to reveal truth with power.⁹ Such literary resources pervade the entire Bible, even the sections that are not pre- 

dominantly literary. 

 

MEANING THROUGH FORM 

The Primacy of Form in the Bible 

 

A literary approach to the Bible is preoccupied with literary form, and that for a very good reason. In any written discourse, meaning is 

communicated through form. The concept of “form” should be construed very broadly in this context: it includes anything that touches 

upon how a writer has expressed his content. Everything that gets communicated does so through form, beginning with language itself. 

 

Literature Uses Unique Forms to Communicate Meaning 

 

While this is true for all forms 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. The result is that before we can understand what a story says 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 (metaphor, simile, image, etc.). 

 

Form and Content Are Inseparable 

 

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 from how it is said, content from form. 

 

LOOKING FOR LITERARY WHOLES 

The Importance of Unity 

 

The most basic of all artistic principles is unity. The literary approach to the Bible accordingly looks for literary patterns and wholeness 

of effect. Richard G. Moulton, pioneer of the literary approach to the Bible, wrote, “No principle of literary study is more important than 

that of grasping clearly a literary work as a single whole.”¹⁰ This literary preoccupation with the overall unity and pattern of biblical 

works stands in contrast to traditional approaches. Austin Farrar, a biblical scholar with excellent literary intuitions, criticizes his own 

discipline on precisely this point: 

 

Form-criticism [as practiced by biblical scholars] is rather misleadingly so called, because the name suggests an attempt to appre- 

ciate the form of a complete literary unit, say St Mark’s Gospel. Whereas what form-criticism studies is the form of the small con- 

stituent parts of the Gospels; anecdotal paragraphs, for example, or even such small details as apparently self-contained gnomic 

sentences. . . . In the literary realm, . . . the pattern of the whole comes first.¹¹ 

 

Traditional and Literary Approaches Contrasted 

 

The tendency of biblical scholars to divide a biblical text into pieces has taken two forms. One is the penchant of liberal scholars for 

undertaking textual “excavations” in an attempt to determine the various strata in the development of a text from its original form to its 

final written form. The other is the practice of conservative scholars to organize the Bible into a theological outline and then treat var- 

ious verses or passages as proof texts. Both procedures end up dividing a text into fragments, as does the verse-by-verse commentary 

that is such a staple of biblical scholarship. The literary approach to the Bible, by contrast, accepts the biblical text in its final form as 

the focus of study. It assumes unity in a text. The resultant ability to see the overall pattern of a story or poem is one of the greatest 

gifts that a literary approach confers. 

 

SUMMARY 

 

The Bible demands a literary approach because its writing is literary in nature. The Bible is an experiential book that conveys the con- 

crete reality of human life. It is filled with evidences of literary artistry and beauty, much of it in the form of literary genres. It also makes 

continuous use of resources of language that we can regard as literary. A literary approach pays close attention to all of these elements 

of literary form, because it is through them that the Bible communicates its message. 

The literary approach to the Bible is becoming increasingly popular among both biblical and literary scholars. Traditional ap- 

proaches to the Bible seem to have reached something of an impasse.¹² 

Given the literary nature of the Bible, it is not surprising that biblical scholars are turning to the methods of literary criticism as a way of 

understanding and discussing the Bible. “I would hope,” writes one of them, “that the new approaches will remain as receptive to lit- 

erary analysis as they are at the present time. . . . It may well be—and I regard this as highly desirable—that biblical literary criticism will 

be deparochialized and reintegrated with non-religious literary criticism in the future.”¹³ “Literary criticism is not. . . just the latest fad- 

dish approach,” writes another; “it represents a significant shift in perspective. . . .”¹⁴ My purpose in the pages that follow is to make 

the methods of literary criticism more accessible to anyone who reads and studies the Bible. 

 

Further Reading 

In keeping with the focus of the opening chapter, the sources that I list here deal in a theoretical way with what it means to approach 

the Bible as literature. I must sound a note of warning in regard to sources that are sometimes included in lists such as this. Not every- 

thing that claims to be a literary approach to the Bible actually is; in fact, most of what has been written to date has not been a genuinely 

literary approach. 

An immense quantity of literary criticism of the Bible has been collected in companion volumes to be published as part of Frederick 

Ungar’s Library of Literary Criticism series; the editors are Alex Preminger and Edward L. Greenstein for the Old Testament and Leland 

Ryken for the New Testament. The sources listed in another reference book, J. H. Gottcenťs The Bible as Literature: A Selective Bibli- 

ography (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979), are a mixed group, more indicative of the methods of biblical scholarship than of literary criticism. 

Examples of biblical scholars whose theory of biblical analysis is essentially literary include William A. Beardslee, Literary Criticism of 

the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970); Amos N. Wilder, Early Christian Rhetoric: The Language of the Gospel (Cambridge: 

Harvard University Press, 1971), and Jesus’ Parables and the War of Myths: Essays on Imagination in the Scripture, ed. James Breech (Phila- 

delphia: Fortress, 1982); Robert C. Tannehill, The Sword of His Mouth: Forceful and Imaginative Language in Synoptic Sayings 

===

Chapter One 

Is the Bible Literature? 

 

New Directions in Biblical Studies 

THERE IS A QUIET REVOLUTION GOING ON in the study of the Bible. At its center is 

a growing awareness that the Bible is a work of literature and that the methods of 

literary scholarship are a necessary part of any complete study of the Bible. There 

are two sides to the movement: literary scholars are showing increasing interest in 

applying their methods to the Bible, and Bible scholars are calling for a literary 

approach.¹ 

A number of ingredients make up this new approach to the Bible: a concern 

with the literary genres of the Bible; a new willingness to treat biblical texts as fin- 

ished wholes instead of as a patchwork of fragments; a focus on the Bible as it 

now stands instead of conducting excavations in the redaction (editing) process 

behind the text; an inclination to use literary instead of traditional theological 

terms to discuss the stories and poems of the Bible; an appreciation for the 

artistry of the Bible; a sensitivity to the experiential, extra-intellectual (more-than- 

ideation-al) dimension of the Bible. 

 

Approaching the Bible as Literature 

 

But above all, the new attitude toward the Bible involves a growing awareness that 

literature expresses truth in its own way, different from ordinary propositional dis- 

course. In other words, when the Bible employs a literary method, it asks to 

be approached as literature and not as something else. In the words of C. S. 

Lewis, “There is a . . . sense in which the Bible, since it is after all literature, cannot 

properly be read except as literature; and the different parts of it as the different 

sorts of literature they are.”² 

 

Defining the Term “Literature” 

 

The purpose of this opening chapter is to identify what makes a text “literature.” I 

should say at once that by the term “literature” I do not mean everything that is 

written. I use it in a more restricted sense to mean the types of writing that are 

often called “imaginative literature” or “creative writing,” in contrast to expository 

writing. In this chapter, I am in effect defining those parts of the Bible that are like 

the works covered in high school and college literature courses. 

 

The Literary Continuum 

 

By thus defining literature I am not establishing an “either-or” method of distin- 

guishing between literary and nonliterary texts. The Bible is obviously a mixed 

book. Literary and nonliterary (expository, explanatory) writing exist side by side 

within the covers of this unique book. I have no intention of building a “great di- 

vide” that would make a biblical passage either literature or nonliterature. Instead, 

I am describing a continuum, or scale, on which some parts of the Bible are more 

literary and other parts are less literary. 

 

More Than One Approach Is Necessary 

 

Nor do I wish to suggest that the literary parts of the Bible cannot be approached 

in other ways as well. I do not question that the literary parts can and should also 

be approached as history and theology. My claim is simply that the literary ap- 

proach is one necessary way to read and interpret the Bible, an approach that has 

been unjustifiably neglected. 

 

Building on Biblical Scholarship 

 

Despite that neglect, the literary approach builds at every turn on what biblical 

scholars have done to recover the original, intended meaning of the biblical text. 

In fact, the literary approach that I describe in this book is a logical extension of 

what is commonly known as the grammatico-historical method of biblical inter- 

pretation. Both approaches insist that we must begin with the literal meaning of 

the words of the Bible as determined by the historical setting in which the authors 

wrote. 

 

The Parable of the Good Samaritan 

 

The best way into the subject is to look at a couple of examples. One of the most 

memorable passages in the whole Bible is the parable Jesus told when a lawyer 

asked him to define who his neighbor was. Here is the definition of “neighbor” 

that Jesus gave (Luke 10:30–36): 

 

A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands 

of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving 

him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when 

he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he 

came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, 

as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity 

on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. 

Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of 

him. The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. 

“Look after him,” he said, “and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra 

expense you may have.” Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to 

the man who fell into the hands of robbers? 

 

The Incarnational Nature of Literature 

 

Everything about this passage makes it a piece of literature. We should notice first 

that Jesus never gives an abstract or propositional definition of “neighbor.” In- 

stead, he tells a story that embodies what it means to be a neighbor. This suggests 

at once the most important thing about literature: its subject matter is human 

experience, not abstract ideas. Literature incarnates its meanings as concretely as 

possible. The knowledge that literature gives of a subject is the kind of knowledge 

that is obtained by (vicariously) living through an experience. Jesus could have de- 

fined neighbor abstractly, as a dictionary does, but he chose a literary approach to 

the truth instead. This is comparable to an experience we probably have all had 

when struggling with the assembly of a toy or appliance: when we have a good 

picture, we may not even need the written instructions. 

 

The Primacy of Imagination (Image-Making) 

 

Because literature presents an experience instead of telling us about that expe- 

rience, it constantly appeals to our imagination (the image-making and image- 

perceiving capacity within us). Literature images forth some aspect of reality. Con- 

sider all the sensory images and gestures we encounter in this parable: robbers 

stripping and beating a victim on a road, specific people traveling down the road, 

first-aid equipment consisting of such tangibles as oil and wine, and such phys- 

ical things as a donkey and an inn and money. We visualize the Samaritan lifting 

the victim onto his donkey and see the money exchange hands and listen to the 

instructions at the inn. 

 

The Genre of Story 

 

The form of the parable is as literary as the content is. For one thing, it is a story 

or narrative, and this is a distinctly literary genre (“type”). The story, moreover, is 

told with an abundance of literary artistry. It follows the storytelling principle of 

threefold repetition: a given event happens three times, with a crucial change 

introduced the third time. The story begins with vivid plot conflict to seize the lis- 

tener’s attention, and from the very start the story generates suspense about its 

outcome. Jesus also makes skillful use of foils (contrasts that “set off” or heighten 

the main point of the story): the neighborliness of the Samaritan stands out all the 

more clearly by its contrast with the indifference of the priest and of the Levite. 

 

Unity, Coherence, Emphasis 

 

Well-constructed stories have unity, coherence, and emphasis. Judged by these 

artistic criteria, this parable of Jesus is a small masterpiece. Nothing is extraneous 

to the unifying theme of neighborly behavior from an unlikely source. The very 

construction of the story makes the emphasis fall on the good Samaritan. One 

critic describes it thus: 

 

The aborted sequences with the priest and Levite provide a pattern which caus- 

es the listener to anticipate the third traveler and build up tension. Since this 

threefold pattern is so common in popular story telling, we also anticipate that 

the third traveler will be the one who will actually help. Our attention is fo- 

cused on the third traveler before he arrives, and this heightens the shock 

when we discover that he neither fits the pattern of cultural expectation nor the 

pattern of expectation created by the series of priest, Levite.³ 

 

Reader Involvement 

 

Not only is the parable inherently literary; its effect on the reader is also literary. 

The story does not primarily require our minds to grasp an idea but instead gets 

us to respond with our imagination and emotions to a real-life experience. It puts 

us on the scene and makes us participants in the action. It gets us involved with 

characters about whose destiny we are made to care. Literature, in short, is 

affective, not cool and detached. This, of course, made it such an effective teach- 

ing medium for Jesus, whose parables often drew his listeners innocently into the 

story and then turned the tables on them after it was too late to evade the issue at 

hand. 

 

SUMMARY 

 

What makes the parable of the good Samaritan a work of literature? Everything 

about it: its experiential approach to truth, its sensory concreteness, its narrative 

genre, its carefully crafted construction, and its total involvement of the reader— 

intellectually, emotionally, imaginatively. 

 

Psalm 23 as a Literary Work 

 

As Exhibit B, we consider the world’s greatest poem, Psalm 23 (RSV): 

 

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; 

he makes me lie down in green pastures. 

He leads me beside still waters; 

he restores my soul. 

He leads me in paths of righteousness [right paths] 

for his name’s sake. 

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, 

I fear no evil; 

for thou art with me; 

thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. 

Thou preparest a table before me 

in the presence of my enemies; 

thou anointest my head with oil, 

my cup overflows. 

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me 

all the days of my life; 

and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord 

for ever. 

 

The Genre of Poetry 

 

What indicates that this is literary writing? We can tell at a glance that this is po- 

etry, another distinctly literary genre. The recurring unit is the poetic line, not the 

sentence. Furthermore, nearly every line follows the same grammatical pattern 

(God is identified as the actor, and then an action is ascribed to him), and many 

of the sentences fall into a pattern of pairs in which the second repeats the 

thought of the first in different words. In short, Psalm 23 is written in a verse form 

known as parallelism. It possesses a memorable, aphoristic quality that ordinary 

discourse lacks. 

 

Unity and Shapeliness 

 

There is equal artistry in the unity and shapeliness of the poem as a whole. The 

poem begins by announcing the theme and the controlling metaphor (the sheep- 

shepherd relationship). It then proceeds to a catalog of the shepherd’s acts on be- 

half of his sheep, from the noontime resting in the shade to the activities 

performed in the sheepfold at the end of the day. And the poem ends with a for- 

wardpointing note of finality. Psalm 23 has a self-contained, carefully crafted qual- 

ity that we associate with art. 

 

Literary Concreteness 

 

Turning from the form to the content, we again sense how literary this text is. We 

see once more the literary impulse to be concrete instead of abstract. Psalm 23 

takes God’s providence as its subject. But the psalmist does not use the word 

providence and does not give us a theological definition of the concept. To drive 

this point home, we might contrast the literary approach of Psalm 23 with the 

theological definition of providence in the Westminster Confession of Faith: 

 

God the Creator of all things doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all crea- 

tures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least, by His most 

wise and holy providence. . . . 

 

The approach of Psalm 23 is the opposite. It turns the idea of God’s providence 

into a metaphor in which God is pictured as a shepherd in the daily routine of car- 

ing for his sheep. The literary approach of Psalm 23 is indirect: first we must pic- 

ture what the shepherd does for his sheep, and then we must transfer that picture 

to the human level. Instead of using abstract, theological terminology, Psalm 23 

consistently keeps us in a world of concrete images: green pastures, water, path- 

ways, rod and staff, table, oil, cup, and sheepfold (metaphorically called a house). 

 

The Differentia of Literature 

 

How does literature work? Psalm 23 again shows us. Literature is concrete and ex- 

periential. It uses tangible images to convey the very quality of lived experience. It 

appeals to our imagination (image-making capacity). It conveys more meanings 

than ordinary expository language does—it would take several pages of expository 

prose to paraphrase all the meanings Psalm 23 compresses into nineteen lines. 

Psalm 23 is more concentrated, more consistently concrete, more obviously artis- 

tic, more eloquent and beautiful, than ordinary prose discourse. 

The parable of the good Samaritan and Psalm 23 are typical of the kind of lit- 

erary writing we keep running into as we read through the Bible. From these two 

examples I wish to branch out into a more systematic anatomy of the principles 

that underlie a literary approach to the Bible. 

 

LITERATURE: THE VOICE OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE 

The Subject of Literature: Human Experience 

 

It is a commonplace that the subject of literature is human experience—not ab- 

stract ideas or propositions, but experience. The knowledge or truth that literature 

gives us is an awareness of reality or truth as it is actually experienced. 

Literature, in other words, shows human experience instead of telling about it. It 

is incarnational. It enacts rather than states. Instead of giving us abstract propo- 

sitions about virtue or vice, for example, literature presents stories of good or evil 

characters in action. The tendency of literature is to embody human experience, 

not to formulate ideas in intellectual propositions. 

 

The Difference Between Literary and Expository Writing 

 

We can profitably contrast the literary and the expository, or documentary, use of 

language. Expository (“explanatory”) writing seeks to tell us, as objectively and 

clearly as possible, facts and information about a subject. Literature, by contrast, 

appeals to our imagination. Literature aims to recreate an experience or situation 

in sufficient detail and concreteness to enable the reader to relive it. 

The Bible contains an abundance of both expository and literary writing. One is 

not inherently better or more effective than the other, and we obviously need both 

types of writing to do justice to all sides of life and truth. The commandment “you 

shall not kill” is expository in its approach to moral truth. The story of Cain and 

Abel (Gen. 4:1–16) embodies the same truth in the distinctly literary form of a 

story (a story that implies but nowhere states that it is sin to murder someone). 

When asked to define “neighbor,” Jesus avoided expository discourse and instead 

told a parable. 

Because literature aims to recreate a whole experience, there is a certain irre- 

ducible quality to it. We may be able to deduce ideas from a story or a poem, but 

those propositions are never an adequate substitute for the embodied vision that 

the literary work itself conveys. The whole story or the whole poem is the meaning 

because the truth that literature communicates is a living through of an expe- 

rience. If the direct statement of an idea conveyed all that a story or poem does, 

the story or poem would be superfluous. But the stories and poems of the Bible 

are emphatically not superfluous. 

 

The Need to Respect the Bible’s Experiential Quality 

 

What does it mean to approach the Bible as literature? It means first of all to be 

sensitive to the experiential side of the Bible. It means to resist the tendency to 

turn every biblical passage into a theological proposition, as though this is what 

the passage exists for. The one thing that the Bible is not, may I repeat, is a theo- 

logical outline with proof texts. 

 

THE CONCRETENESS OF LITERATURE 

Concreteness in Biblical Poetry 

 

The chief means by which literature communicates the very quality of human 

experience is concreteness. In literature we constantly encounter the sights and 

sounds and vividness of real life. This is most easily seen in the poetry of the 

Bible. For the biblical poets, nothing remains wholly abstract. Longing for God be- 

comes as tangible as thirst “in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Ps. 

63:1). Slander is pictured as weapon-toting ambushers “who sharpen their 

tongues like swords/and aim their words like deadly arrows” (Ps. 64:3). Pride be- 

comes a necklace and violence a garment (Ps. 73:6). 

 

The Concreteness of Biblical Stories 

 

The impulse toward concreteness is no less prominent in the stories of the Bible. 

Even to express truth in the form of people doing things in specific settings is to 

choose a concrete medium rather than the abstract form of expository writing. It is 

easy to deduce a dozen ideas from the Bible’s story of origins (Gen. 1–3) and to 

state these ideas as propositions, but the account itself almost totally avoids stat- 

ing the truth about God and creation abstractly. It embodies everything in the con- 

crete form of characters performing actions and saying things that we overhear. 

Biblical stories exist on a continuum from a bare outline of what happened to a 

full account of how it happened. The more fully and concretely the story is told, 

the more literary we should consider it to be, and the stories of the Bible usually 

lean in the direction of literary concreteness. Consider a random passage from the 

Book of Acts (3:1–5): 

 

One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the time of prayer— 

at three in the afternoon. Now a man crippled from birth was being carried to 

the temple gate called Beautiful, where he was put every day to beg from those 

going into the temple courts. When he saw Peter and John about to enter, he 

asked them for money. Peter looked straight at him, as did John. Then Peter 

said, “Look at us!” So the man gave them his attention, expecting to get some- 

thing from them. . . . 

 

A television camera could not have captured the event more vividly than this. If 

the writer’s purpose were to state only what happened, there is a lot of excess bag- 

gage in the passage. But given the literary criterion of concreteness and vividness, 

the emphasis on how it happened is exactly what we should expect. 

 

The Prominence of Dialogue in the Bible 

 

We might also note in passing that one of the most distinctive traits of biblical 

writing, especially biblical stories, is the prevalence of direct speech and dialogue. 

Biblical storytellers are always busy quoting what characters said and giving us 

snatches of dialogue instead of indirect summaries of conversations. This, too, is 

part of the Bible’s literary vividness. What could be more actual and immediate 

than the very words a character used? 

 

Concreteness in New Testament Epistles 

 

The impulse toward concrete vividness is not limited to the poetry and stories of 

the Bible. We find it in the Epistles, for example, mingled with the predominantly 

theological mode: 

 

Endure hardship with us as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. ... An athlete . . . 

does not receive the victor’s crown unless he competes according to the rules. 

The hard-working farmer should be the first to receive a share of the crops (2 

Tim. 2:3, 5–6). 

 

Even the letter as a form is more experiential and literary, less systematic and 

expository, than an essay or sermon. 

 

SUMMARY 

 

At the level of content, biblical literature is characterized by experiential concrete- 

ness. It is filled with the settings and sensations and actions of everyday life. It 

incarnates ideas in the form of poetic images, stories of characters in action, and 

living situations in which readers can imaginatively participate. It appeals to the 

understanding through the imagination. 

 

The Need to Be Imaginative Readers 

 

What is the practical result of this concreteness? It means that we should read the 

Bible with our imaginations (image-making capacity) as well as with our reason. If 

we are to read the Bible as literature, we must be active in recreating the experi- 

ences and sensations and events it portrays. We must be sensitive to the physical 

and experiential qualities of a passage and avoid reducing every passage in the 

Bible to a set of abstract themes. If we have “antennae” only for theological con- 

cepts or historical facts, we will miss much of what the Bible communicates and 

will distort the kind of book it is. 

 

The Importance of Images 

 

The Bible appeals to our imagination and emotions as well as to our reason and 

intellect. It conveys more than abstract ideas because its aim is to express the 

whole of reality. The Bible recognizes that a person’s world view consists of im- 

ages and symbols as well as ideas and propositions. A noted theologian has said 

that 

 

we are far more image-making and image-using creatures than we usually 

think ourselves to be and . . . are guided and formed by images in our minds. . 

. . Man . . . is a being who grasps and shapes reality . . . with the aid of great 

images, metaphors, and analogies.⁴ 

 

There is no better illustration of this than the Bible, an authoritative religious book 

that conveys the truth about reality by means of stories and characters and images 

and lifelike situations far oftener than by theological abstraction. 

 

Truthfulness to Life and Reality 

 

All of this affects how we should read the Bible. Reading the Bible as literature in- 

cludes reading it for its ideas and implied assertions and themes, but it includes 

more than this. Literature conveys a sense of life—a sense of how the writer 

thinks and feels about what really exists, what is right and wrong, what is valuable 

and worthless. Literature can be true to reality and human experience as well as 

being the embodiment of a true proposition. Literature is true whenever we can 

say about its portrayal of life, “This is the way life is.” 

 

Reading the Bible to Absorb a Sense of Life 

 

Reading biblical literature does not have to result in the intellectual grasp of an 

idea. We also read it to absorb or experience a sense of the way things truly are. In 

the parable of the good Samaritan, Jesus did not have to add a definition of 

“neighbor”; the meaning of the parable is complete if we recognize and experience 

the neighborly behavior of the Samaritan. This has big implications for what might 

be called the devotional reading of the Bible. The stories and poems of the Bible 

achieve their devotional purpose whenever they reinforce a reader’s general sense 

of the reality of God, or produce an awareness of what is moral and immoral, or 

influence a person’s estimate of what is valuable and worthless. We are affected 

by more than ideas when we read literature, though, of course, ideas are part of 

the total experience. We read literature not primarily to acquire information but to 

contemplate experience and reality as a way of understanding them better. One of 

the rewards of reading literature, including the Bible, is that our own experiences 

and beliefs are given shape and expression. 

Traditional approaches to the Bible lean heavily toward the conceptual and 

doctrinal. We have erroneously operated on the premise that a person’s world 

view consists solely of abstract ideas—but it also includes stories and images. A 

literary approach to the Bible can go a long way toward respecting the other half of 

a person’s world view—and the other side of the brain, to use contemporary psy- 

chological theory. The Bible is more than a book into which we reach for proof 

texts. What would happen if, instead of tracing ideas through the Bible, we traced 

a single image, such as light or food or garment or rock? We would have covered 

an amazing range of biblical doctrine, in a manner completely in keeping with the 

kind of book the Bible is. 

 

LITERATURE REQUIRES INTERPRETATION 

The Need to Interpret 

 

From what I have already said it is easy to see why literature requires more of a 

reader than straightforward expository writing. Literature always calls for interpre- 

tation. It expresses its meanings by a certain indirection. The statement that “our 

neighbor is anyone whom we encounter in need of our help” is direct and requires 

no interpretation. By comparison, Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan requires a 

reader to determine what the details in the story add up to. 

 

Interpreting Stories 

 

The more concrete or complex a story is, the more open it becomes to interpre- 

tation. The story of David in the Old Testament illustrates this. What does the 

story of David communicate about God, people, and society? There is, of course, 

no single answer, nor is it always easy to determine exactly what truth is commu- 

nicated by this or that episode in the story. It is no wonder that the story of David 

has elicited so many interpretations.⁵ 

 

Interpreting Poetry 

 

Biblical poetry also requires interpretation on the part of the reader. Consider, for 

example, the most important of all figures of speech: metaphor and simile. These 

figures of speech compare one thing to another: “He is like a tree planted by 

streams of water” (Ps. 1:3). Exactly how is the godly person like a tree? How many 

of the suggested points of comparison are valid? These are questions of interpre- 

tation that metaphor and simile always place before a reader. 

 

Some Advantages of the Literary Approach 

 

If the need to interpret literature and the unavoidable differences in interpretation 

from one reader to another strike us as a risk, we should also note the advantages 

of literature as a medium. They include memorability, ability to capture a reader’s 

attention, affective power, and ability to do justice to the complexity and multi- 

plicity of human life as we actually experience it. 

 

THE ARTISTRY OF LITERATURE 

Literature is an interpretive presentation of human experience. But it is more 

than that. It is also an art form, characterized by beauty, craftsmanship, and tech- 

nique. Not merely what is said, but the how of a piece of writing is always impor- 

tant in literature. 

 

The Elements of Artistic Form 

 

The elements of artistic form that all types of literature (in fact, all art forms) share 

include pattern or design, theme or central focus, organic unity (also called unity 

in variety, or theme and variation), coherence, balance, contrast, symmetry, repe- 

tition or recurrence, variation, and unified progression. In stories these ingre- 

dients will take one form, in poems another, as subsequent chapters in this book 

will show. But whatever the genre (literary type), the sheer abundance of literary 

technique and artistry that we find in many parts of the Bible make it a literary 

masterpiece that we can enjoy for its beauty as well read for its truth. What the 

writer of Ecclesiastes said about his own theory of composition applies equally to 

most biblical writers: he labored, he tells us, to arrange his material “with great 

care,” and to “find pleasing words” or “words of delight” (Eccl. 12:9–10, RSV). 

 

The Purposes of Artistry 

 

What functions are served by this type of artistry? And why is it important to be 

aware of this dimension of the Bible? Artistic form serves the purpose of inten- 

sifying the impact of what is said, but also the purposes of pleasure, delight, and 

enjoyment. Artistry satisfies the human urge for beauty and craftsmanship. If a 

person set out to spend some time every day reading in the so-called sacred 

books of the world, I can predict which one most people would grow least tired of 

reading. Literary analysis is capable of showing why the Bible is an interesting 

book rather than a dull book to read. A famous detractor of biblical religion called 

the Bible “unquestionably the most beautiful book in the world.”⁶ 

 

Reading with Artistic Sensitivity 

 

What does the artistry of the Bible require of the reader? We need to be prepared 

to identify and enjoy the elements of literary form we find. A literary approach is 

sensitive to the artistic beauty of the Bible. It sees value in the craftsmanship of 

biblical writers. It relishes the stories and poems of the Bible as products of verbal 

and imaginative skill. That the Bible possesses such artistry is indisputable; the 

elements of artistic form and beauty I have mentioned are manifestly there. The 

only question is whether as readers we are prepared to recognize and enjoy the 

artistry. The artistic excellence of the Bible is not extraneous to its total effect. It is 

one of the glories of the Bible. 

 

LITERARY GENRES 

Literary and Expository Genres 

 

The commonest way of defining literature is by its genres, or literary types. 

Through the centuries, people have agreed that certain genres (such as story, po- 

etry, and drama) are literary in nature. Other genres, such as historical chronicles, 

theological treatises, and genealogies, are expository (informational) in nature. 

Still others fall into one or the other category, depending on how the writer han- 

dles them. Letters, sermons, and orations, for example, can move in the direction 

of literature if they display the elements of literature discussed in this chapter. 

 

The Importance of Genres 

 

Each literary genre has its distinctive features. Each has its own “rules” or proce- 

dures. This, in turn, affects how we read and interpret a work of literature. As read- 

ers we need to come to a given text with the right expectations. If we do, we will 

see more than we otherwise would, and we will avoid misreadings. If we know that 

stories are built around a central conflict leading to final resolution, we are in a 

position to see something that the writer has built into the story. Literary genre is 

nothing less than a “norm or expectation to guide the reader in his encounter with 

the text.”⁷ An awareness of genre will program our reading of a work, giving it a 

familiar shape and arranging the details into an identifiable pattern. 

Knowing how a given genre works can spare us from misinterpretations. For 

example, exaggeration in a story that purports to be factual history is a form of un- 

truth, while that same type of exaggeration in lyric poetry is called hyperbole and is 

a standard way of expressing emotional truth. The reliability of documentary his- 

tory depends partly on the writer’s inclusion of all the relevant historical material, 

but as interpreters we realize that literary narrative is much more selective and 

interpretive, incorporating material only to highlight the specific perspective a 

storyteller wishes to give to a character or event. 

How important is the notion of genre to literature and the Bible? Two biblical 

scholars answer that question at the beginning of a book on biblical interpre- 

tation: 

 

. . . the basic concern of this book is with the understanding of the different 

types of literature (the genres) that make up the Bible. Although we do speak to 

other issues, this generic approach has controlled all that has been done.⁸ 

 

A literary approach to the Bible agrees with this emphasis on literary genres, 

though it does not find the list of genres discussed by biblical scholars to be 

wholly adequate, nor is it totally satisfied with the scholars’ descriptions of literary 

genres. 

 

The Literary Genres of the Bible 

 

The Bible is a mixture of genres, some literary, some expository, some mixed. The 

major literary genres are narrative or story, poetry (especially lyric poetry), proverb, 

and visionary writing (including prophecy and apocalypse). Historical writing in 

the Bible frequently moves in the direction of literary narrative by virtue of its ex- 

periential concreteness or the principles of pattern and design that permeate such 

writing. The epistles of the New Testament frequently become literary because 

their style is either poetic or artistic or both, and biblical satire usually employs a 

literary vehicle to communicate its attacks. 

The Bible also has its share of genres that are either unique or decidedly hy- 

brid, but these are sufficiently similar to familiar literary genres to yield their 

meanings if approached with literary tools. Biblical prophecy, for example, re- 

quires an ability to interpret poetry and satire. Biblical apocalypse is not a typical 

story, nor is it ordinary poetry, yet narrative and poetry are exactly the right cate- 

gories with which to approach the Book of Revelation. 

 

LITERATURE AS A SPECIAL USE OF LANGUAGE 

Literary Language 

 

Literature uses special resources of language in a way that people through the 

centuries have agreed to call literary. This quality cuts across literary genres and, 

in fact, appears in texts that we would not consider to be primarily literary. 

Literature exploits, for example, such devices of language as metaphor, simile, 

allusion, pun, paradox, and irony. Of course, these resources of language are the 

very essence of poetry, but the important thing about the Bible is that they appear 

everywhere, not just in the poetry. This is why, incidentally, a literary approach is 

necessary throughout the Bible and not just in the predominantly literary parts. 

 

Literary Language in Biblical Stories 

 

The story of Cain’s murder of Abel (Gen. 4:1–16) illustrates how the stories of the 

Bible can use figurative language that we recognize as distinctly literary. When 

Cain becomes angry at his brother, God warns him that “sin is crouching at your 

door” (v. 7). This statement is an example of personification in which an abstract 

moral quality is figuratively treated as a person or animal. Biblical scholars dis- 

agree on whether sin is pictured here as “couching” or “crouching” at the door, 

but in either case we have to interpret the statement figuratively: sin is either a 

monster waiting to pounce on Cain if he does not get control of his anger, or it is 

a monster that, through long acquaintance, has become a familiar part of the 

household. 

Later in the same story God tells Cain, “Your brother’s blood cries out to me 

from the ground. . .which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from 

your hand” (vv. 10–11). This, too, is figurative and an obvious deviation from nor- 

mal language. It shows that even in nonpoetic parts of the Bible the writers use lit- 

erary and poetic resources of language. As readers we need to identify and inter- 

pret figurative language throughout the Bible. Indeed, there is no book of the Bible 

that is not partly literary. 

 

Literary Language in Epistles 

 

This is true even of the most explicitly theological parts of the New Testament 

Epistles. Consider the following specimen: 

 

Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with 

God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of 

the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. 

In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple 

in the Lord (Eph. 2:19–21). 

 

The passage is thoroughly theological, but the language is poetic. Almost every- 

thing is expressed through metaphors: an unbeliever is an exile, a believer is a cit- 

izen and family member, Christians are a church building, and so on. It is hard to 

find a page in the Bible that does not make at least some use of the resources of 

language that are distinctly literary. 

 

Rhetorical Patterns in the Bible 

 

Not only individual words and images but also larger rhetorical patterns are a 

pervasive literary presence in the Bible. Examples include parallelism (two or more 

consecutive clauses arranged in similar grammatical form), rhetorical questions, 

question-and-answer constructions, imaginary dialogues, the aphoristic concise- 

ness of a proverb, and any highly patterned arrangement of clauses or phrases 

(such as the intricate system of threes in 1 Cor. 13). A biblical scholar has analyzed 

the presence of “tensive language,” or “forceful and imaginative language,” in the 

New Testament; he shows how such language uses rhetorical devices to break 

through the clichés of ordinary language and to reveal truth with power.⁹ Such lit- 

erary resources pervade the entire Bible, even the sections that are not predom- 

inantly literary. 

 

MEANING THROUGH FORM 

The Primacy of Form in the Bible 

 

A literary approach to the Bible is preoccupied with literary form, and that for a 

very good reason. In any written discourse, meaning is communicated through 

form. The concept of “form” should be construed very broadly in this context: it 

includes anything that touches upon how a writer has expressed his content. 

Everything that gets communicated does so through form, beginning with lan- 

guage itself. 

 

Literature Uses Unique Forms to Communicate Meaning 

 

While this is true for all forms of writing, it is especially crucial for literature. Liter- 

ature 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. The result is 

that before we can understand what a story says 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 (metaphor, sim- 

ile, image, etc.). 

 

Form and Content Are Inseparable 

 

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 from how it is said, content from form. 

 

LOOKING FOR LITERARY WHOLES 

The Importance of Unity 

 

The most basic of all artistic principles is unity. The literary approach to the Bible 

accordingly looks for literary patterns and wholeness of effect. Richard G. Moul- 

ton, pioneer of the literary approach to the Bible, wrote, “No principle of literary 

study is more important than that of grasping clearly a literary work as a single 

whole.”¹⁰ This literary preoccupation with the overall unity and pattern of biblical 

works stands in contrast to traditional approaches. Austin Farrar, a biblical schol- 

ar with excellent literary intuitions, criticizes his own discipline on precisely this 

point: 

 

Form-criticism [as practiced by biblical scholars] is rather misleadingly so 

called, because the name suggests an attempt to appreciate the form of a com- 

plete literary unit, say St Mark’s Gospel. Whereas what form-criticism studies 

is the form of the small constituent parts of the Gospels; anecdotal para- 

graphs, for example, or even such small details as apparently self-contained 

gnomic sentences. . . . In the literary realm, . . . the pattern of the whole comes 

first.¹¹ 

 

Traditional and Literary Approaches Contrasted 

 

The tendency of biblical scholars to divide a biblical text into pieces has taken two 

forms. One is the penchant of liberal scholars for undertaking textual “excava- 

tions” in an attempt to determine the various strata in the development of a text 

from its original form to its final written form. The other is the practice of conser- 

vative scholars to organize the Bible into a theological outline and then treat var- 

ious verses or passages as proof texts. Both procedures end up dividing a text 

into fragments, as does the verse-by-verse commentary that is such a staple of 

biblical scholarship. The literary approach to the Bible, by contrast, accepts the 

biblical text in its final form as the focus of study. It assumes unity in a text. The 

resultant ability to see the overall pattern of a story or poem is one of the greatest 

gifts that a literary approach confers. 

 

SUMMARY 

 

The Bible demands a literary approach because its writing is literary in nature. The 

Bible is an experiential book that conveys the concrete reality of human life. It is 

filled with evidences of literary artistry and beauty, much of it in the form of lit- 

erary genres. It also makes continuous use of resources of language that we can 

regard as literary. A literary approach pays close attention to all of these elements 

of literary form, because it is through them that the Bible communicates its 

message. 

The literary approach to the Bible is becoming increasingly popular among 

both biblical and literary scholars. Traditional approaches to the Bible seem to 

have reached something of an impasse.¹² 

Given the literary nature of the Bible, it is not surprising that biblical scholars are 

turning to the methods of literary criticism as a way of understanding and dis- 

cussing the Bible. “I would hope,” writes one of them, “that the new approaches 

will remain as receptive to literary analysis as they are at the present time. . . . It 

may well be—and I regard this as highly desirable—that biblical literary criticism 

will be deparochialized and reintegrated with non-religious literary criticism in the 

future.”¹³ “Literary criticism is not. . . just the latest faddish approach,” writes an- 

other; “it represents a significant shift in perspective. . . .”¹⁴ My purpose in the 

pages that follow is to make the methods of literary criticism more accessible to 

anyone who reads and studies the Bible. 

 

Further Reading 

In keeping with the focus of the opening chapter, the sources that I list here 

deal in a theoretical way with what it means to approach the Bible as literature. I 

must sound a note of warning in regard to sources that are sometimes included in 

lists such as this. Not everything that claims to be a literary approach to the Bible 

actually is; in fact, most of what has been written to date has not been a genuinely 

literary approach. 

An immense quantity of literary criticism of the Bible has been collected in 

companion volumes to be published as part of Frederick Ungar’s Library of Lit- 

erary Criticism series; the editors are Alex Preminger and Edward L. Greenstein for 

the Old Testament and Leland Ryken for the New Testament. The sources listed in 

another reference book, J. H. Gottcenťs The Bible as Literature: A Selective Bibli- 

ography (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979), are a mixed group, more indicative of the 

methods of biblical scholarship than of literary criticism. 

Examples of biblical scholars whose theory of biblical analysis is essentially lit- 

erary include William A. Beardslee, Literary Criticism of the New Testament (Phila- 

delphia: Fortress, 1970); Amos N. Wilder, Early Christian Rhetoric: The Language of 

the Gospel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), and Jesus’ Parables and the 

War of Myths: Essays on Imagination in the Scripture, ed. James Breech (Phila- 

delphia: Fortress, 1982); Robert C. Tannehill, The Sword of His Mouth: Forceful and 

Imaginative Language in Synoptic Sayings (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975); James A. 

Fischer, How to Read the Bible (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1981) , pp. 30–45; 

J. P. Fokkelman, Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel, vol. 1 (Assen, The 

Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1981), especially pp. 1–18; Norman R. Petersen, “Lit- 

erary Criticism in Biblical Studies,” in Orientation by Disorientation, ed. Richard A. 

Spencer (Pittsburgh: Pickwick, 1980), pp. 25–50. 

Literary scholars who have applied their methods to the Bible include Roland 

M. Frye, “A Literary Perspective for the Criticism of the Gospels,” in Jesus and 

Man’s Hope, //, ed. Donald G. Miller and Dikran Y. Hadidian (Pittsburgh: Pitts- 

burgh Theological Seminary, 1971), pp. 193–221; and also “The Synoptic Problems 

and Analogies in Other Literatures,” in The Relationships among the Gospels: An 

Interdisciplinary Dialogue, ed. William O. Walker, Jr. (San Antonio: Trinity 

University Press, 1978), pp. 261–302; Leland Ryken, The Literature of the Bible 

(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974); selected contributors to Literary Interpretations 

of Biblical Narratives, vols 1, 2, ed. Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis (Nashville: Abingdon, 

1974 and 1982); Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 

1981); Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Har- 

court Brace Jovanovich, 1982) . 

Most promising of all is the model represented by a literary critic and a biblical 

scholar who combined their respective areas of expertise: David Rhoads and Don- 

ald Michie, Mark as Story (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982). 

 

 

¹For selected examples, see the sources listed in the “Further Reading” section 

at the end of this chapter. 

²Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958), 3. 

³Robert C. Tannehill, “Critical Discussion,” Semeia 2 (1974): 115. 

⁴H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 

151–52, 161. 

⁵For an overview, see The David Myth in Western Literature, ed. Raymond-Jean 

Frontain and Jan Wojcik (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1980). 

⁶H. L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods, 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1946), 286. 

⁷Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 

136. 

⁸Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth 

(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982), 11. 

⁹Robert C. Tannehill, The Sword of His Mouth: Forceful and Imaginative Lan- 

guage in Synoptic Sayings (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975). 

¹⁰The Modern Reader’s Bible (New York: Macmillan, 1895), 1719. 

¹¹A Study in St Mark (London: Dacre, 1951), 21–22. 

¹²It is hard to pick up a scholarly religious journal these days without catching 

hints of a discipline in transition. For a concentrated initiation into the current 

state of the discipline, the best source is the essays collected in Orientation by Dis- 

orientation: Studies in Literary Criticism and Biblical Literary Criticism, ed. Richard A. 

Spencer (Pittsburgh: Pickwick, 1980). 

¹³William G. Doty, Letters in Primitive Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973), 

79, 81. 

¹⁴Robert M. Fowler, “Using Literary Criticism on the Gospels,” Christian Cen- 

tury, 26 May 1982, 627.