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

by Leland Ryken

  Proportionate Space as a Form of Highlighting

  Highlighting can consist of the amount of space that a given detail or event gets in a story. In the Greek text of the parable of the good Samaritan, for example, “there are forty-six words given to what precedes the arrival of the Samaritan on the scene but sixty words devoted to his arrival and, step-by-step, to his reaction. Since this reaction is so unexpected, it must be spelled out in explicit detail.”18

  Crucial or Decisive Events as a Form of Highlighting

  There is an alternative to a writer’s using proportionate space to highlight the central feature of a story, and that is to throw a relatively small facet of a story into relief by making it the crucial or decisive aspect. Jacob’s wrestling with the angel at the brook Jabbok (Gen. 32:22–32) takes only eleven verses to tell, but it is the great turning point in Jacob’s story and the clue to what the storyteller wishes us to see in the story as a whole. In terms of sheer space, the aggressive selfishness of Jacob is far more dominant, but the prolonged account of Jacob the scoundrel exists only as the background against which the main point of the story stands silhouetted.

  The story of Ruth contains a similar instance of a small detail that gets foregrounded. Near the end of the story, we find the ostensibly matter-of-fact statement that the child born to Ruth and Boaz was named “Obed. He was the father of Jesse, the father of David” (Ruth 4:17). In terms of space, it is of only passing interest, but as Ronald Hals comments, with the mere mention of David “the story of Ruth takes its place as simply one more bit of Heilsgeschichte [“sacred history”], for it clearly aims to trace the background of the great David. In fact, the story could well be described as messianic history.”19

  Point of View in Stories

  Once we have discovered what a biblical story is about (and it might be about more than one thing), we need to complete the task of interpretation by determining exactly what the storyteller says about and with that subject matter. What perspective are we invited to share with the storyteller? To use the terminology of literary criticism, what point of view governs the writer’s account of the characters and action in the story? The answers to these questions are multiple.

  Authorial Statement as a Guide to Point of View

  Sometimes a biblical storyteller enters the story and directly states the interpretive framework that he intends us to apply to the story. When the writer of the Abraham story stops the flow of ţhe action to state, “Abram believed the LORD, and ije credited it to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:6), the editorial comment presents a major theme of the whole story, namely, the reward that attendş faith in God. When we read later in Genesis that “the LORD was with Joseph and shewed him mercy” (Gen. 39:21 KJ), we know that the providential theme is a main meaning of the story. What is the controlling theme that underlies the Gospel of John? The writer himself tells us: “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” (John 20:31).

  Scarcity of Authorial Statement

  Although such authorial commentary does occur in the stories of the Bible, the significant thing is how rarely it happens compared to what we find in stories outside the Bible. Generally speaking, biblical storytellers narrate what happened but do not explain it.

  Normative Characters Within Stories

  It is much more common to find that characters within the stories of the Bible make key utterances that we intuitively recognize as summing up what the story as a whole is asserting. At the end of the Joseph story, Joseph himself suggests an interpretive framework for the whole story when he tells his brothers, “As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive” (Gen. 50:20). This providential theme of the victory of redemptive suffering over intended evil is at the very heart of what the story communicates. Whenever a character in a story interprets the meaning of the story in this way, we can call both the character and the viewpoint normative (authoritative). The Gospel stories are filled with such normative spokespersons, such as the centurion in the Passion story who exclaims, “Surely he was the Son of God!” (Matt. 27:54).

  God as Normative Spokesman

  In the Bible there is a special category of normative characters. In many stories God or, in the Gospels, Jesus makes a stated or implied comment on the meaning of the action. The pattern begins with the story of the Fall in Genesis 3, where God enters the action to pronounce judgment against Adam and Eve for their disobedience. Thereafter the appearance of God as a normative character is the rule rather than the exception in Old Testament stories. A similar pattern pervades the Gospel narratives, where the stories involving Jesus typically include some pronouncement by Jesus about the meaning of an episode.

  The Typical Indirectness of Authorial Viewpoint

  The point of view in most biblical stories is conveyed, not by explicit statements from either the storyteller or normative characters within the stories, but in a more indirect manner. More often than not, the persuasive or interpretive strategy in biblical narrative is embodied within the details of the stories. It is up to the reader to read the interpretive signals accurately.

  Selectivity as a Form of Authorial Viewpoint

  Authorial selectivity and arrangement of details lie behind every story in the Bible. There is always more than one way to tell a given story. The story as it finally stands has been consciously assembled by the author for a calculated effect on the audience. In short, storytellers control what you see and don’t see, how you see it, and when you see it.

  Controlling What You See and Don’t See

  We can take the story of David to show authorial selectivity as a way of influencing how readers interpret a story. David’s story is included in three different Old Testament works. In 1 and 2 Samuel, the writer puts the first part of David’s life into a providential framework of God’s favor toward the hero, and he includes events that idealize David. Then all of a sudden in 2 Samuel 11–12 we get the Bathsheba/Uriah debacle, accompanied by God’s judgment. The rest of the story becomes a detailed anatomy of the misery that followed in the wake of David’s great sin. The writer has obviously given David’s life a tragic interpretation.

  But in 1 Kings (e.g., 9:4; 11:4, 6; 15:3) David appears as a norm of the godly ruler against which evil kings are weighed and found wanting. Even more striking is the picture in 1 Chronicles, which tells us both more and less than the Books of Samuel. Here we find six chapters describing David’s gathering of materials for the temple and his arrangements for temple worship, and seven chapters devoted to the hero’s military exploits. We hear nothing, however, about the Bathsheba/Uriah episode. This selectivity gives us a heroic interpretation of David’s life, with emphasis on his piety and courage and national accomplishments.

  Character Portrayal as a Conscious Interpretation by the Writer

  The fact that David emerges as a partly different person in the various accounts shows that writers influence how we interpret characters and action simply by what they choose to include and exclude. Characters in biblical stories are conscious creations of the storytellers, not in the sense that the writers disregard the real-life person, but in the sense that they decide what to include and exclude from their portrait. Just as people in real life elicit more than one response and assessment from those who know them, biblical writers do noTaſl see a given character in exactly the same way. We are here talking about the multiplicity of a character, not questioning the reliability of a storyteller. David’s life was both tragic and heroic.

  Point of View in the Gospels

  The Gospels are an even more famous example of how a biblical storyteller’s very selection of material results in an interpretation of the character and events that make up the story. Biblical scholars have established in detail how each of the Gospels tells the story of Jesus from its own perspective, and that this viewpoint is discernible in large part in what each author decided to include in his account. Luke, for exa
mple, included a number of distinctive incidents and teachings of Jesus that involve the poor, women, and non-Jewish people (especially Samaritans) that are absent from the other Gospels. This selectivity reflects an interpretation of the person and mission of Jesus.

  Selectivity in the Hagar Story

  Selectivity can also produce more localized effects in stories. Consider, for instance, the way in which we respond to Hagar and her son Ishmael in Genesis 21. The relative illegitimacy of Ishmael and his exclusion from the covenant line are underscored by his antagonism toward Isaac, the true child of promise (vv. 8–10). If this antagonism and the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael were all that was included in the story, our impression would be one of simple condemnation. But the storyteller includes more than that. He elicits our pity for the mother and child wandering in the desert (vv. 15–16), and he lends a kind of sanction to them by including God’s rescue of Hagar and his words of kindness to her (vv. 17–20). If we had only the first half of this story, our final assessment of the characters and events would be far different from what they are now.

  All of this leads to an important principle of narrative interpretation: assume that the storyteller has included every detail for a purpose, and do not hesitate to reflect on how the story is affected by the inclusion of a detail as compared with the effect if the detail were omitted.

  The Ending of a Story as an Implied Comment on Its Meaning

  As readers we are influenced not only by what we see and don’t see (the writer’s selectivity), but also by the arrangement of the material. Most important of all is the way in which a story ends. One of the inherent principles of narrative is the idea of outcome. If characters in stories undertake an experiment in living, then the outcome of that experiment is an implied comment on its adequacy or inadequacy. It is in this context that the narrative convention of poetic justice makes most sense. Why do most biblical stories end with poetic justice? Because it is a way for a storyteller to indicate his own world view and system of moral values.

  Endings in Biblical Stories

  Almost any story in the Bible will illustrate the way in which the outcome of the story casts a retrospective interpretation over the preceding action. In Genesis 13 we read about the parting of the ways of Abraham and Lot and the different types of life to which they commit themselves. It is the type of crossroads experience that calls for a sequel. This is exactly what we get several chapters later, where Lot’s life degenerates into a sordid end, while Abraham’s life blossoms into a life of spiritual and domestic blessing. In the same story, Abraham and Sarah’s decision to have a child by the maid Hagar leads to problems, both immediately and throughout subsequent Jewish history. That outcome influences how we interpret Abraham’s venture in expediency. Ruth risks herself by choosing a new nation and a new God, and the conclusion of the story shows the reward that was hers. King Saul decides to win popularity with the people by following a path of expediency instead of obeying God and comes to a tragic end.

  The accompanying rule for interpreting biblical stories is an important one: look upon the conclusion of a story as an implied comment on (evaluation of) the characters and events that the story has presented.

  Influencing a Reader’s Sympathy and Aversion

  Much of the rhetorical or persuasive strategy of biblical storytellers consists of getting readers to respond to characters and events in a designed way. At its very heart, narrative is a form in which authors influence their readers to respond with either sympathy or aversion to what happens in the story. A literary scholar who made a thorough study of the “devices of disclosure” by which selected storytellers influenced how readers interpret the ethical meaning of their stories concluded that the meaning of a story “depended heavily on how successful its creator was in controlling our sympathy and antipathy toward, approval and disapproval of, characters, thoughts, and actions at every stage.”20

  The reader of the stories in the Bible has a special advantage in this regard. The stories of the Bible are embedded in a much larger book that contains an abundance of explicitly didactic and doctrinal material. The overtly didactic parts of the Bible are a constant frame of reference by which to evaluate characters and events in the stories of Scripture.

  Sympathy and Aversion in the Story of Naboth’s Vineyard

  We can use the story of Naboth and his vineyard (1 Kings 21:1–16) as an example of how the meaning of a story depends on the way in which the author manages to guide our sympathy and aversion toward the characters and events in the story. The first thing that secures our sympathy toward Naboth is his religious reason for refusing to relinquish his vineyard (v. 3). With the double reference to “the inheritance of my fathers” (vv. 3, 4) our minds reach back to the Mosaic stipulations regarding land as a sacred trust of the family that had originally received it (Lev. 25:13–28; Num. 36:9). King Ahab, by contrast, elicits our disdain by his sullenness, his irreligious insensitivity to the Mosaic law, and his childish pouting (v. 4). Queen Jezebel quickly emerges as even more shocking to our moral sensibilities. Her intrigue against the innocent Naboth violates both universal moral norms and biblical moral commands. As readers we protest every inch of the way as she manipulates the helpless Naboth, hires perjured witnesses, cruelly engineers the stoning of an innocent man, and callously tells Ahab to take possession of the vineyard. Even if we did not have the benefit of Elijah’s pronouncement of God’s judgment in the verses immediately following, we would know what this gripping story means.

  Stories Communicate by Affecting

  Stories are affective by their very nature. They draw us into an encounter with characters and events to which we inevitably respond. Someone has said that “the writer expresses what he knows by affecting the reader; the reader knows what is expressed by being receptive to effects. The medium of this process is language.”21 Responses can, of course, be ill-informed or simply wrong, but we will do a better job of interpreting the meaning of stories, both in the Bible and beyond it, if we pay attention to how the characters and events affect us, whether sympathetically or unsympathetically. Stories convey their meanings partly by influencing the reader’s responses to events and situations.

  The rule of interpretation that follows from the affective nature of narrative is this: pay attention to how a story influences your approval and disapproval of events and characters, and formulate a statement of what the story means on the basis of this approval pattern.

  The Clarity of Biblical Narrative

  We know from disagreements among readers that some biblical stories remain ambiguous or controversial (usually in part rather than as a whole) when this rule of reader response is applied to them. But the overwhelming majority of biblical stories will yield a clear interpretation based on a reader’s response to characters and events. It is true that biblical storytellers preserve the mystery of human character and supernatural reality, but their implied assertions about reality, morality, and values are clear. Their stories conform to novelist Joyce Cary’s theory that “all writers. . .must have, to compose any kind of story, some picture of the world, and of what is right and wrong in that world,” and that good writers insure that “a reader. . .never be left in doubt about the meaning of a story.”22 Of course, if modern readers disregard what the Bible says about reality, morality, and values in its doctrinal parts, they will naturally blur the focus that biblical storytellers have built into their stories. But that will be the fault of the reader, not the writer.

  SUMMARY

  The sheer quantity of “rules” for reading and interpreting biblical stories may seem overwhelming. If so, may I say that these principles are not a list that anyone needs to memorize. They are simply rules of storytelling and interpretation that we should be ready to apply when the occasion arises. We tend to apply most of these rules intuitively, simply as close readers of the biblical text. But most of us can sharpen our ability to read biblical stories by being more systematic than we usually are.

  A b
rief checklist of the narrative elements that require scrutiny looks something like this:

  Physical, temporal, and cultural settings in a story.

  Characters in the story, with special emphasis on the protagonist.

  Plot conflicts and their resolution.

  Aspects of narrative suspense (how the story arouses curiosity about outcome).

  The protagonist’s experiment in living as an implied comment about life.

  Narrative unity, coherence, and emphasis.

  Elements of testing and choice in the story.

  Character progress and transformation.

  Foils, dramatic irony, and poetic justice.

  The implied assertions about reality, morality, and values.

  Repetition and highlighting as clues to what the story is about.

  Point of view in the story—how the writer gets a reader to share his attitude toward the characters and events.

  The Story of the Birthright as a Test Case

  To bring all of this into focus, I wish to apply these principles to the story of Esau’s selling of his birthright to his brother Jacob. The story is this (Gen. 25:27–34):