Chapter Three
Types of Biblical Stories
IN ADDITION TO THE GENERAL FEATURES of stories noted in the preceding chapter,
there are a number of traits that are characteristic of more specialized narrative
genres. These subtypes within the general category of narrative have their own
procedures and rules of interpretation. Two of these subtypes, parable and gospel,
will receive separate treatment in later chapters.
HEROIC NARRATIVE
A Definition of Heroic Narrative
The largest branch of narrative is heroic narrative. Hero stories are built around
the life and exploits of a protagonist. Such stories spring from one of the most
universal impulses of literature—the desire to embody accepted norms of behav-
ior or representative struggles in the story of a character whose experience is typ-
ical of people in general.
Literary Heroes
The following definition of a literary hero is a good starting point for discussing
heroic narrative:
A traditional. . .hero must be more than merely the leading figure or protag-
onist of a literary work. The true hero expresses an accepted social and moral
norm; his experience reenacts the important conflicts of the community which
produces him; he is endowed with qualities that capture the popular imagi-
nation. It must also be remarked that the hero is able to act, and to act for
good. Most important of all, the narrative of his experience suggests that life
has both a significant pattern and an end.¹
The practical import of this definition is simple: both the dynamics of the action
and the meanings the storyteller is trying to get across will be concentrated in the
central hero. In interpreting a hero story, therefore, we cannot go wrong if we
focus on the protagonist. The hero’s conflicts and encounters comprise the plot
of the story, and we can organize our understanding and discussion of the story
around them.
Ways of Portraying a Hero
Determining the precise identity of a literary hero is a prime task whenever we read
a heroic narrative. The hero’s identity is revealed chiefly through six means: the
hero’s (1) personal traits and abilities, (2) actions, (3) motivations, (4) responses
to events or people, (5) relationships, and (6) roles.
The Hero Is Representative of Humanity
A literary hero or heroine is representative. The purpose behind the storyteller’s
selection of specific heroes and events is that they in some sense capture the
universal human situation. It is a commonplace that whereas the historian tells us
what happened, the writer of literary narrative tells us what happens. The hero sto-
ries of the Bible do more than set the historical record straight. They are also
models or paradigms of the religious experience of the human race. They capture
what is true for us and for people around us. Characters like Joseph and Ruth and
David do not stay within their stories in the Bible; they merge with our own experi-
ences as we begin to “build bridges” between their stories and our own.
The Hero as an Ideal
Usually such representative heroes are exemplary of some ideal, though they need
not be wholly good (in the Bible they rarely are completely idealized). Stories tend
to get written about people whose character and exploits we can look up to. The
stories of the Bible are no exception. They give us a memorable gallery of moral
and spiritual models to emulate.
Conveying an Ideal by Negative Example
On the other hand, stories can also inculcate a positive ideal by negative example.
They can indirectly encourage good behavior by telling the story of a hero who
failed to measure up to such a standard. Some of the most foolish misreadings of
biblical stories I have encountered have come from a misguided assumption that
we are intended to approve of the behavior of biblical heroes in virtually every
episode in which they figure. One of the distinctive features of the Bible is how
deeply flawed its heroes and heroines are. The Bible portrays most of its protag-
onists as Cromwell wished to be painted—warts and all.
Hero Stories Are More Than Moral Fables
Of course, in describing hero stories as moral or spiritual examples, I run the risk
of making them appear to be simplistic moral fables. This is emphatically not true
of heroic narrative in the Bible. All we need to do is dip into biblical scholarship
and literary criticism to sense that these stories are subtle, frequently complex to
interpret, and usually characterized by a kind of cryptic understatement or mystery
that requires the reader to supply an abundance of interpretation. The moment we
reduce the moral or spiritual meaning of the hero’s experience to an idea, we have
turned the story into a platitude and robbed it of its power.
How Stories Picture Reality
The antidote lies in respecting how stories work. The values or virtues that are
inculcated by a hero story like that of Joseph or Ruth are embodied in the protag-
onist’s character and life. The strategy of literature is to give form and shape to
human experience by projecting it onto a character. A story can communicate
truth or reality or knowledge simply by picturing some aspect of human expe-
rience. A story conveys truth whenever we can say, “This is the way life is.”
In other words, “the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience,
not an abstraction.”² To say that the story of Abraham embodies an ideal of faith
is not to offer that interpretation as a substitute for the story but as a pair of eyes
by which to see what the story itself means. As readers we must preserve the in-
tegrity of the story as a story, while at the same time realizing that “all narrative. .
.possesses. . .some quality of parable.”³
Questions to Ask of Hero Stories
Since a literary hero incarnates a society’s views of reality, morality, and values,
the following issues are good ones to explore when reflecting on hero stories.
1.The view of people. What kind of beings are people? How can people
achieve meaning in life? What is the proper end or goal for a person? What
is humanity’s origin and what is its destination?
2.The religious view. Does the story postulate a transcendental realm? If so,
what is its nature? How is the other world related to this world? How can a
person be vitally related to God?
3.The view of society. What is the nature of the human community? What is
the individual’s role in society? What is the nature of the individual’s obliga-
tions to his or her fellow humans?
4.The question of values. What does the story postulate as the highest value
in life? Is it a person (God, self, some individual, people in general), an
institution (state, church, home), an abstract quality (love, truth, beauty,
order), or something physical like nature?
SUMMARY
Hero stories focus on the struggles and triumphs of the protagonist. The central
hero or heroine is representative of a whole group and is usually a largely exem-
plary character, at least by the end of the story. The hero or heroine’s destiny is an
implied comment about life and reality.
EPIC
A Definition of Epic
Epic is a species within the class of heroic narrative. It is long narrative, a hero
story on the grand scale. A single heroic narrative does not rate as an epic because
it lacks epic scope. Epic is an encyclopedic form that includes as much as pos-
sible. Northrop Frye calls it “the story of all things.”⁴ Epic is so expansive that it
sums up a whole age; one scholar claims that “the supreme role of epic lies in its
capacity to focus a society’s self-awareness.”⁵
The Story of a Nation
As part of this expansiveness, epic always has a strong nationalistic interest. The
epic hero’s story deals with more than a personal destiny; his story represents the
destiny of a whole nation. Historical allusions therefore abound in epics, which
tend to portray the significant and formative events in the life of a nation. The
“great primary epics deal with their cultures at some primitive moment of crisis.”⁶
Common epic motifs include kingdom, conquest, warfare, and dominion. In one
way or another, epic portrays epoch-making events in the life of a nation.
Supernatural Element
Supernatural settings, characters, and events have always been a hallmark of epic.
Events in such stories occur on a cosmic stage that includes an “other” world as
well as the earth. Supernatural agents enter the human world and participate in the
action. This, too, is one of the means by which epics give us images of greatness
and mystery.
Epic Structure
Despite its expansiveness, an epic is tightly structured. One authority, after listing
“amplitude, breadth, inclusiveness” as epic traits, goes on to say that “exuber-
ance. . .is not enough in itself; there must be a control commensurate with the
amount included.”⁷ Epics therefore always have a unifying hero. The action is con-
structed around a central epic feat, which usually consists of winning a battle and
establishing a kingdom. Many epics have been structured as a quest toward a
goal. Because of its sheer length and scope, an epic always has a mildly episodic
plot (we can’t remember the whole story at once, for example), but the wealth of
detail is firmly controlled by an overall design.
The Epic of the Exodus
The most obviously epic work in the Bible is the epic of the Exodus. For literary
purposes, the key narrative sections are Exodus 1–20 and 32–34; Numbers 10–14,
16–17, and 20–24; and Deuteronomy 32–34 (a retrospective interpretive framework
for the whole epic, from the mouth of the epic hero himself). Several things make
the story of the Exodus an epic. It meets the test of long narrative. It is nation-
alistic in emphasis, recording the formation of Israel as a nation and depicting the
decisive events in the early history of the nation. This story, composed at a mo-
ment of national self-consciousness, was a definitive repository of the religious,
moral, and political ideals of the society that produced it. The story is set in his-
tory and filled with historical allusions. It is unified partly by a normative hero and
partly by the quest for the Promised Land. The world of the story is alive with
supernatural intervention.
Old Testament Historical Books
If the historical chronicles of the Old Testament are to be approached as liter-
ature, epic is a fruitful rubric under which to study them. The Book of Joshua, for
example, is unified by the motif of Israel’s conquest of Canaan and its quest to
establish itself in the Promised Land, all under the direction of Joshua. The Book
of Judges lacks a unifying hero and is perhaps better viewed as a collection of
separate hero stories, though certain features of the book resemble epic. The story
of David is definitely an epic story. David, in fact, is the closest parallel in the Bible
to the epic hero of the Western tradition: he is the warrior who conquers his ene-
mies, the political ruler, and the representative person of his culture.
Genesis
The Book of Genesis also approximates the epic genre. It is atypical in having four
patriarchs instead of a single hero as the epic protagonist. But in other respects it
meets epic expectations. It is a moderately long story that traces the early ancestry
of a nation. Because of the covenant theme that pervades the story, it is a story of
destiny. This is much more than the history of individual heroes or even of a fam-
ily; it is nothing less than the beginning of salvation history, the history of the
whole human race viewed from the perspective of God’s acts of redemption and
judgment. And Genesis possesses to a greater degree than perhaps any other bib-
lical story the quality of elemental human experience that epic is so adept at cap-
turing.
The Book of Revelation
The New Testament Book of Revelation is also an epic, though not exactly a typ-
ical one. It is a story of great and heightened battle conducted in part by super-
natural beings using supernatural means of warfare. The setting is cosmic. The
story recounts the exploits of a hero who conquers his enemies and establishes
his eternal empire. There are scenes set in heaven, where decisions are made that
are then enacted on earth, in a manner reminiscent of the councils of the gods in
conventional epics. There are also visions of future history, another epic conven-
tion. And the style of Revelation is closer to the exalted style of conventional epic
than is true of any other book in the Bible. Revelation is filled with similes, cata-
logs, epithets, allusions, repeated formulas, and sheer verbal and imagistic exu-
berance.
The Epic Aura of the Bible
Although the Pentateuch, the Book of Joshua, the story of David, and the Book of
Revelation are the only full-fledged epics in the Bible, it is also apparent that the
Bible as a whole is frequently epic-like. It has the “feel” of other ancient epic liter-
ature. The continuous presence of God as a character in the stories alone would
make it similar to epic literature. The nationalistic tone and focus of the Old Testa-
ment lend an epic aura to the stories and even to the prophecies. The framework
of epic literature, therefore, is continuously relevant to the literary study of biblical
narrative, and other epics are more likely to furnish literary parallels than modern
novels.
COMEDY
Comic Plots
When speaking of comedy as a type of story, literary critics do not mean a humor-
ous story but rather one with a certain shape of plot. Comedy is the story of the
happy ending. It is usually a U-shaped story that begins in prosperity, descends
into tragedy, and rises again to end happily. The first phase of this pattern is often
omitted, but the upward movement from misery to happiness is essential.
Story Elements in a Comic Plot
The main elements of such a comic plot are easy to identify. The overall progres-
sion is from problem to solution, from bondage to freedom. The plot consists of
a series of obstacles that must be overcome en route to the happy ending. Often
these obstacles are characters who stand in the way of happiness, but external cir-
cumstances or inner personality traits can also constitute the obstacles to fulfill-
ment. In comic stories the protagonist is gradually assimilated into society (in
contrast to tragedy, where the hero becomes progressively isolated from society).
The typical ending of a comedy is a marriage, feast, reconciliation, or victory over
enemies. Two contrasting ways of concluding a comic story are the conversion of
villainous characters and the expulsion of such characters from the scene of fes-
tivity or triumph.
Plot Devices
The overall comic movement from bondage to freedom is accompanied by a host
of familiar story elements that have become virtually synonymous with literary
comedy: disguise, mistaken identity, character transformation from bad to good,
surprise, miracle, providential assistance to good characters, sudden reversal of
misfortune, rescue from disaster, poetic justice, the motif of lost and found, rever-
sal of conventional expectations (as when the younger child is preferred over the
older), sudden release. Whereas tragedy stresses what is inevitable, comedy is
built around the unforeseeable.
Comedy as the Dominant Biblical Form
It is a commonplace of literary criticism that comedy rather than tragedy is the
dominant narrative form of the Bible and the Christian gospel.⁸ The Bible as a
whole begins with a perfect world, descends into the misery of fallen history, and
ends with a new world of total happiness and victory over evil. Within this overall
comic structure occur numerous smaller U-shaped stories of the type described
above. Perhaps the stories of Joseph and Ruth are prototypical, but in fact such
stories dominate biblical narrative. There are even stories (including the Book of
Job and the four Gospels) that are often considered to be tragedies but that are
actually comic in structure if we take the ending of the story into account.
TRAGEDY
Tragedy has held an honored position in literature generally. It is less pervasive
in the Bible than in literature as a whole, but it is nonetheless an important biblical
form.
The Story of a Fall
At the level of plot or action, tragedy is the story of exceptional calamity. It por-
trays a movement from prosperity to catastrophe. Because it depicts a change of
fortune, tragedy must be differentiated from pathos, which depicts unmitigated
suffering from the very start. Tragedy focuses on what we most fear and wish to
avoid facing—the destructive potential of evil.
The Tragic Hero
In tragedy the focus is on the tragic protagonist, who until modern times was a
person of high social standing. Such a tragic hero, usually a king or ruler, is
greater than common humanity, though not superior to the natural order and to
moral criticism. The high position of a tragic hero at the beginning of the story
goes beyond his or her belonging to the social elite; this exalted figure is under-
stood to be representative of general humanity. Ordinarily a tragic hero possesses
something that we can call greatness of spirit. All of this grandeur is brought tum-
bling down by a final trait of the tragic hero—a tragic flaw of character. Aristotle’s
word for it was hamartia (translated “sin” in the New Testament), a missing of the
mark. Aristotle described it as “some great error or frailty,” some “defect which is
painful or destructive.” In other words, tragedy always portrays caused suffering.
The Plot of Tragedy
The plot of tragedy focuses on human choice. The story begins with the protag-
onist facing a dilemma that demands a choice. Drawn in two or more directions,
the tragic hero makes a tragic choice that leads inevitably to catastrophe and suf-
fering. This means that a tragic hero is always responsible for the downfall (since it
is the result of choice and action by the hero). Usually the tragic hero is also de-
serving of the downfall, since the choice involved some frailty of character (though
in literary tragedy generally the punishment is disproportionately great compared
with the fault). Often a tragic hero achieves some measure of moral perception as
a result of his or her suffering.
A Definition of Tragedy
To summarize, tragic stories tend to unfold according to the following tragic pat-
tern of action: dilemma /choice /catastrophe /suffering /perception/ death.
Tragedy can be defined as a narrative form in which a protagonist of high degree
and greatness of spirit undertakes an action (makes a choice) within a given tragic
world and as a result inevitably falls from prosperity to a state of physical and spir-
itual suffering, sometimes attaining perception.
Biblical Tragedies
The prototypical biblical tragedy is the story of the Fall in Genesis 3. The great
masterpiece of biblical tragedy is the story of Saul in 1 Samuel.⁹ If we keep in mind
that tragedy assigns a specific cause to the hero’s downfall and localizes the
beginning of woe at a particular point in the hero’s life, the story of David as nar-
rated in 1 and 2 Samuel adheres to a tragic pattern, since David’s tragic sufferings
begin with the Bathsheba/Uriah incident. The story of Samson (Judg. 13–16) is
also a tragedy. Some of the parables of Jesus also enact the tragic pattern.¹⁰
The Book of Job and the Gospels
In addition to these full-fledged tragedies, there are two major instances of biblical
narrative where the definition of literary tragedy partly fits the story, even though
the story as a whole is comic. Because tragedy deals with human suffering, the
Book of Job has repeatedly been discussed in terms of literary tragedy, although
the story as a whole has the U-shaped movement and happy ending of comedy.
The same situation is true of the four Gospels: they conclude with the happy end-
ing of a comic plot, but much of the action before that falls into the pattern of
literary tragedy.¹¹
The Relative Absence of Tragedy in the Bible
The most remarkable thing about the Bible and literary tragedy is that there are so
few tragedies in the Bible. In a book so concerned with sin and the judgment upon
sin, we might expect to find an abundance of tragedy. Yet as Northrop Frye puts it,
“The Bible is not very friendly to tragic themes.”¹² The Bible focuses its attention
on the redemptive potential of human tragedy. While never minimizing the facts
of human evil and suffering, the Bible is, however, preoccupied with more than
what is tragic in human suffering. The result is a collection of stories of potential
tragedy—stories on which a modern writer could base a tragedy but which in their
biblical version avoid a tragic ending through the intervention of human repen-
tance and divine forgiveness.
Further Reading
Even when critics do not use the term “heroic narrative,” the commonest ap-
proach to the stories of the Old Testament is some version of what I have defined
under that heading. Specimens of such commentary can be found in Images of
Man and God: Old Testament Short Stories in Literary Focus, ed. Burke O. Long
(Sheffield: Almond, 1981). Explications of selected Old Testament stories are
given in my book The Literature of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974) in
chapters on heroic narrative (pp. 45-78), the epic of the Exodus (pp. 81-92), and
biblical tragedy (pp. 95-106).
¹Walter Houghton and G. Robert Stange, ed., Victorian Poetry and Poetics (Bos-
ton: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), xxiii.
²Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1957), 73.
³Frank Kermode, “Interpretive Continuities and the New Testament,” Raritan,
Spring 1982, 36.
⁴The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics (Toronto: University of Toron-
to Press, 1965), 3.
⁵Hugh M. Richmond, The Christian Revolutionary: John Milton (Berkeley: Univ-
ersity of California Press, 1974), 124.
⁶Richmond, 124.
⁷E. M. W. Tillyard, The English Epic and Its Background (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1966), 6, 8.
⁸For good discussions, see the following: Frederick Buechner, Telling the
Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale (New York: Harper and Row,
1977), 49–98; Nelvin Vos, The Drama of Comedy: Victim and Victor (Richmond:
John Knox Press, 1966); Paul H. Grawe, Comedy in Space, Time, and the Imagi-
nation (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1983), 267–99; Northrop Frye, The Great Code (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 169–98.
⁹The best discussion of a biblical tragedy that I have seen is the analysis of the
Saul story by Edwin M. Good, Irony in the Old Testament (Philadelphia: West-
minster, 1965), 56–80.
¹⁰For a preliminary discussion, see Dan Otto Via, Jr., The Parables: Their Literary
and Existential Dimension (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), especially 110–44.
¹¹On the tragic dimension of the Gospels, see especially Roger L. Cox,
“Tragedy and the Gospel Narratives,” Yale Review, 57 (1968), 545–70; and Gilbert
G. Bilezikian, The Liberated Gospel: A Comparison of the Gospel of Mark and Greek
Tragedy (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1977).
¹²The Great Code, 181.
