by Leland Ryken
SUMMARY
The Bible is not a collection of isolated fragments. It is a vast system of recurring images, character types, plot motifs, and type scenes. As we read a given biblical passage, we are reminded of other similar material elsewhere in the Bible. In this process, the Bible assumes a remarkable unity in our thinking.
UNIFYING STYLISTIC TRAITS
The Bible is written in a rich variety of styles. In the midst of all the variety, however, certain stylistic tendencies help to give the Bible a discernible literary unity. There are, of course, numerous passages that do not fit the generalizations I am about to note, but the very fact that we think of these as exceptions proves the validity of the general rules that scholars have attributed to the Bible’s style.
Concrete Rather Than Abstract
The biblical tendency toward the concrete is well known. There are many great abstractions in the Bible (including the Psalms), but in general the biblical writers show a concern for things rather than ideas. God is portrayed as light and rock and thunder. Wealth is visible and tangible. So are human emotions. Even the prose sections of the Bible resemble poetry in their reliance on concrete images.
Realism
The Bible is a realistic book. Its characters and settings are predominantly nonaristocratic (unlike other ancient literature). The Bible, writes Erich Auerbach, “engenders a new elevated style, which does not scorn everyday life and which is ready to absorb the sensorily realistic, even the ugly, the undignified, the physically base.’’14 The Bible also portrays the flaws of even its best characters.
Simplicity
The style of the Bible is marked by simplicity. Its characteristic imagery comes from daily life. Its narrative style is plain and unembellished, with only the essential details included. Shakespeare has a vocabulary of more than fifteen thousand words and Milton thirteen thousand, while the King James Bible has a vocabulary of about six thousand different words.15 The biblical imagination also operates with simplified dichotomies, such as light and darkness, good and evil, heroes and villains, the tiny nation against its overpowering enemies. “The simplicity of the Bible,’’ writes Northrop Frye, “is the simplicity of majesty. . . ; its simplicity expresses the voice of authority.’’16
Elemental Quality
The Bible is par excellence the book of elemental human experience. It depicts what is true for all people in all times and places. In the words of John Livingston Lowes, “the Biblical vocabulary is compact of the primal stuff of our common humanity—of its universal emotional, sensory experiences.”17 Someone else has expressed it thus:
The themes of the Bible are simple and primary. Life is reduced to a few basic activities—fighting, farming, a strong sexual urge, and intermittent worship. . . .We confront basic virtues and primitive vices. . . .The world these persons inhabit is stripped and elemental—sea, desert, the stars, the wind, storm, sun, clouds, and moon, seedtime and harvest. . . . Occupation has this elementary quality also.18
Brevity
The Bible displays a preference for brevity over length. Biblical writers overwhelmingly work with brief units that are relatively self-contained. Individual episodes in stories from Genesis through the Gospels are almost never elaborated at length. The characters in these stories are illuminated by momentary flashes of heroism or evil or courage and so forth. When we move from the stories of the Bible to other genres, the forms are consistently brief ones: lyric, song, parable, proverb, prophetic vision, letter. The aphoristic, or proverbial, style of the Bible is a further evidence of this preference for conciseness and economy. The Bible is therefore a vast collection of concentrated moments of epiphany, “a series of ecstatic moments or points of expanding apprehension,” as Northrop Frye calls it.19
Repetition
All of literature relies on various forms of repetition, but the Bible has even more of it than most literature, probably because so much of the Bible was originally oral literature. In poetry this urge for repetition takes the form of parallelism and rhetorical patterns. There is an equal abundance of repetition in the stories of the Bible, Jesus’ parables and discourses, and the Epistles.20
The Spoken Word
The style of the Bible is an oral style. The prevalence of dialogue in biblical narrative is unique in ancient literature.21 But the Bible is everywhere filled with voices speaking and replying. To read the Bible well is to become a listener, either literally or in one’s imagination.
Affective Power
The style of the Bible is predominantly affective. It moves us as well as appealing to our reason. It convinces us by evoking a response from us. The characteristic (though not exclusive) biblical way of conducting an argument is to repeat the main point so often that we feel or experience the truth of the assertion. The stories and parables of the Bible force us to respond to characters and events. The poems and oratory and Epistles are impassioned.
SUMMARY
The style of the Bible is uniquely powerful and beautiful. It can be parodied but never duplicated. The elements that make the Bible the most expressive book in the world include concreteness, realism, simplicity, an elemental quality, brevity, repetition, emphasis on the spoken word, and affective power.
Further Reading
The strength of Northrop Frye’s The Great Code is the way in which it leaves a reader with a unified impression of the whole Bible. The best short introduction to the literary unity of the Bible is Roland M. Frye, “Introduction” to The Bible: Selections from the King James Version for Study as Literature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965; reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. ix-xxxix. Volume 5 (1951) of Interpretation contains numerous still-useful articles on the unity of the Bible. The sources cited in the footnotes to chapter 12 also have good additional comments on the topic.
A wealth of good generalizations about the style of the Bible has been gathered by D. G. Kehl, ed., Literary Style of the Old Bible and the New (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970).
1Introduction to The Bible: Selections from the King James Version for Study as Literature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), xvi.
2C. S. Lewis, The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version (Philadelphia: Fortress 1963), 32-33.
3Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953, 1968), 14-15.
4Roland Frye, Introduction, xvi.
5Howard Mumford Jones, “The Bible from a Literary Point of View,” in Five Essays on the Bible (New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1960), 52.
6The Bible as Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 257.
7See especially God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952).
8Henn, Bible as Literature, 21. Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., Toward an Old Testament Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1978), 20–40, elaborates the same theme.
9The Unity of the Bible (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953), 99.
10The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 79.
11Ibid., 105–38.
12M. D. Goulder, Type and History in Acts (London: S.P.C.K., 1964), organizes the entire Book of Acts around this type scene.
13The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 51.
14Mimesỉs, 12.
15Cỉeỉand B. McAfee, The Greatest English Classic (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1912), 105.
16The Great Code, 211.
17“The Noblest Monument of English Prose,” in Literary Style of the Old Bible and the New, ed. D. G. Kehl (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 9.
18Jones, “The Bible,” 52–53.
19Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 326.
20Good sources to consult as a starting point on repetition include James Muilenburg, “A Study in Hebrew Rhetoric: Repetition and Style,” Vet us Testamentum Supplements 1 (1953): 97–111; Robert C. Tanne
hill, The Sword of His Mouth (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975); Jacob Licht, Storytelling in the Bible (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1978), 51–95; and Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative, 88–113.
21See Auerbach, Mimesis, 46; Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative, 63–87; and Amos N. Wilder, Early Christian Rhetoric (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 40–54.
Appendix:
The Allegorical Nature of the Parables
The part of this book that will be most objectionable to biblical scholars is my discussion of the parables as allegories. It seems advisable, therefore, to explore the matter in more detail in this appendix.
The approach of biblical scholars is based from start to finish on their aversion (which I share) to the arbitrary allegorizing of the Bible that the medieval Fathers championed and that has been around ever since. For some people, moreover, the very concept of allegory has connotations of being simplistic or superficial (a bias that I do not share). Convinced that allegory is a bad thing, biblical scholars proceed to multiply the reasons why the parables cannot be considered allegorical. For the most part, these reasons betray an understanding of allegory that simply does not hold up when applied to literature in general.
I have outlined my own proposed solution in my chapter on the parables. I believe that it will only create confusion if we deny the name allegory to stories that fit the definition of allegory as applied elsewhere in literature. It is far preferable to treat the parables as allegorical texts and then to insist on accurate as opposed to arbitrary interpretation of the details. Allegorizing a biblical text is illegitimate, but interpreting an allegorical text is not.
I propose that we take a critical look at the reasons that are commonly offered for denying that the parables are allegorical. The list of such arguments includes the following.
The parables are not allegorical because in an allegory every detail has a corresponding “other” meaning. This is untrue of allegory in literature generally, where the same range exists as we find in the parables, as Northrop Frye suggests with his allegorical continuum. On the opening page of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, we attach allegorical meaning to such details as Christian, the book in his hand, and the burden on his back, but not to his house, wife, and children. When Aslan is killed near the end of C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, we ascribe symbolic meaning to Aslan’s death and resurrection, but not to such narrative details as the stone table, the shaving of Aslan, and the mice who gnaw through the ropes binding Aslan. It is a very rare exception, not the rule, to find allegories in which every detail has a corresponding meaning.
The parables are not allegories because “the details are not intended to have independent significance” (Charles Dodd). Modern scholarship has championed the view that we should ignore the individual details in the parables and stand back at such a distance from them that only one general point emerges. But this is something we cannot do even if we try because with most of the parables at least some of the details automatically remind us of a corresponding reality. Jesus himself provided the model for such interpretation. When Jesus interpreted the parable of the sower for his disciples (Matt. 13:18–23), he gave a corresponding meaning to every major detail in the story except the sower. When Jesus explained the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matt. 13:36–43), he gave eight of the narrative details a meaning.
Even Milton Terry, who denies that the parables are allegorical, admits that “most of the details in a parable have a meaning, and those which have no special significance in the interpretation serve, nevertheless, to enhance the force and beauty of the rest” (Biblical Hermeneutics [1883; reprint ed., Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1964], 286). In my chapter on the parables I cited the conclusions of M. D. Goulder, who found that 82 percent of the details in the parables in Matthew’s Gospel have a corresponding meaning, 75 percent in Mark, and 60 percent in Luke. Of course some parables (such as the parable of the good Samaritan) have no allegorical details. What we need, therefore, is a sliding scale that allows us to be flexible in describing the unique contours of each parable; Frye’s allegorical continuum provides exactly this flexibility.
“The point of the parable is not in the points of reference as it would be in a true allegory” (Fee/Stuart). The mere identification of correspondences is never synonymous with the main theme or purpose of an allegory. Once we have identified Bunyan’s City of Destruction as the lost state and the Slough of Despond as despair over one’s sin, we must still translate those details into a statement of literary theme and purpose. If, on the other hand, the quoted statement means that the allegorical details in a parable are somehow extraneous to the theme of a parable, this, too, is untrue. In the parable of the prodigal son, for example, the whole point of the parable depends on our identifying the father as God, the prodigal as a repentant sinner, and the elder brother as the scribes and Pharisees.
“The parable uses words in their literal sense, and its narrative never transgresses the limits of what might have been actual fact. The allegory is continually using words in a metaphorical sense, and its narrative, however supposable in itself is manifestly fictitious” (Terry, p. 302). Here, too, the neat dichotomy between allegory and parable breaks down. The parables, for example, have struck most readers through the centuries as being “manifestly fictitious,” a quality that Terry reserves for allegory. Allegory, says Terry, uses words “in a metaphorical sense.” So do the parables; in fact, recent parable interpretation has stressed their metaphorical qualities. Many of the details in Jesus’ parables already had metaphoric meanings before Jesus told them: God as father, judge, and vineyard owner; God’s word as seed that is planted; divine judgment as a harvest—the list goes on and on.
It is true that the parables are noteworthy for the realism of their surface details, whereas most allegories have employed the techniques of fantasy part of the time (though rarely all of the time). But the narrative details of a work like The Pilgrim’s Progress are often taken straight from Bunyan’s local Bedfordshire. In any case, allegory need not be fantastic, as Jesus’ allegory of the Good Shepherd (John 10:1—18) illustrates. Besides, the parables of Jesus, for all their realism, are saturated with elements of the preposterous or exaggerated, such as a grain of wheat that when planted produces a hundred grains, a mustard plant treated as though it were a gigantic tree, an employer who completely disregards how long his employees have worked when he pays them, and a housewife who bakes a bushel of bread dough.
The parables are not allegories because in allegory the surface details of the story are unimportant in themselves and exist only to point to a truth beyond themselves. This may be true of transparent or unsophisticated allegory, but not of genuinely literary allegory. Allegories like Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene or Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress are literary masterpieces that elicit the reader’s full imaginative response at the realistic or surface level of the narrative. Great literary allegory is bifocal, engaging a reader’s interest at two levels (literal and allegorical) simultaneously. Literary allegory does not give us a simple one-for-one correspondence because surface details such as Bunyan’s slough, journey, burden, and river are too connotative and multifaceted to be reduced to a single conceptual parallel. (For more on this subject, see E. Beatrice Batson’s John Bunyan: Allegory and Imagination [London: Croom Helm, 1984].)
“A parable is aesthetic in a way that an allegory is not” (Dan Via, Jr.). For many scholars, this is really the heart of the matter: the parables are just too good to be allegorical! But literary classification should be descriptive, not honorific. Besides, modern criticism on such literary masterpieces as The Divine Comedy, The Faerie Queene, and The Pilgrim’s Progress has long since exploded old myths about the supposed artistic anemia of literary allegory. (Here, too, Batson’s book is the best source.)
When we look closely at what biblical scholars say, it is apparent to me that their comments misconstrue the nature of allegory as a literary form. If we apply the
scholar’s composite definition of allegory to literature as a whole, there is virtually no piece of literature to which we could apply the title.
The result of denying that the parables are allegorical has been to confuse people about how to deal with the parables. We are told that the parables are not allegories, and then we find Jesus allegorizing the parables of the sower and the wheat and tares. Nor does it inspire confidence in our ability to handle parables to be told that “the parables are not allegories—even if at times they have what appear to be allegorical features” (Fee/Stuart).
The most obvious feature of the parables is that they are realistic stories, simple in construction and didactic (“aiming to teach”) in purpose, that convey religious truth and in which the details often have a significance beyond their literal narrative meaning. In any other context we would call such works allegorical. My proposal is simple and commonsensical: we should begin with what is obvious (that the parables tend to be allegorical) and then note those things that distinguish these particular allegories: their profound realism, their brevity, their absence of allegorical names for people and places, their persuasive strategy designed to force a response, their ingenious way of subtly undermining ordinary patterns of thinking, their variability in regard to how many details call for a corresponding meaning, and their artistic excellence.
