by Leland Ryken
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 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 experiential 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 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 statement 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 interpret 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 constructions, 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 predominantly 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 appreciate the form of a complete literary unit, say St Mark’s Gospel. Whereas what form-criticism studies is the form of the small constituent 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 various 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 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 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 discussing 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 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 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 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 Bibliography (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 (Philadelphia: 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, “Literary 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: Pittsburgh 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: Harcourt 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 Donald 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 Language 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 Disorientation: 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 Century, 26 May 1982, 627.
Chapter Two
The Stories of the Bible
The Prominence of Stories in the Bible
GOD MADE PEOPLE BECAUSE HE LOVES STORIES. So claims a rabbinic saying. Henry R. Luce, founder of Time Magazine, quipped, “Time didn’t start this emphasis on stories about people; the Bible did.”
Narrative is the dominant form in the Bible. Its prominence is well captured in Amos Wilder’s oft-quoted statement that “the narrative mode is uniquely important in Christianity.”1 What this means to readers of the Bible is that the more they know about how stories work, the more they will enjoy and understand vast portions of the Bible.
Historical Documentation Versus Literary Narrative
The stories of the Bible vary widely in regard to the fullness with which they are told. Some are entries in a historical chronicle; they obey the documentary impulse to tell what happened, avoiding the literary impulse to present in detail how it happened.
At the other end of the continuum we find full-fledged stories like those of David and Job. These obey the literary impulse to present an event rather than simply tell about it. They are full, circumstantial, and embellished with detail, and they allow the reader to recreate the story in his or her imagination.
Not every sequence of events in the Bible is a story in the literary sense of that term. Given the continuum that ranges from a bare
summary of events to a full account of how the events occurred, the closer a story is to the detailed end of the spectrum, the more justified we are in approaching it with the interpretive tools outlined in this chapter.
Stories as an Invitation to Share an Experience
Whenever a biblical storyteller goes beyond the documentary impulse to record what happened and proceeds to describe how it happened, he thereby signals that he wishes us, the readers, to share an experience, perhaps a prolonged experience, with one or more characters. The phenomenon known as identifying with characters in a story involves a reader’s going through the action with a specific character.
Readers as Participants and Spectators
The implication of this experiential dimension of stories is that as readers we must be active, either as participants or as spectators. The power of story as a literary form is its uncanny ability to involve us in what is happening. Storytellers put us on the scene and in the middle of an action. They pluck us out of our own time and place and put us into another time and place. As Norman Perrin puts it, “The natural function of narrative is to help the reader hear the voices, take part in the action, get involved in the plot.”2 The more vividly storytellers portray the action and characters and settings, the more compelling is their sway over our attention, as the biblical storytellers knew so well.
