Words of Delight: A Literary Introduction to the Bible

Cover

Preface

This is a book of literary criticism on the Bible. Its format is simple: it combines theoretic comments about various literary aspects of the Bible, accompanied by explications of selected texts to illustrate the theory. My intention is that this combination of theory and illustration will provide my readers with a methodology that they can apply to other biblical texts as well.

This revised edition of Words of Delight incorporates into it a volume that was originally a separate book—Words of Life: A Literary Introduction to the New Testament. The literary approach that I develop in this combined volume parallels that in my book How to Read the Bible as Literature (Zondervan, 1984), but this book contains actual explications of texts lacking in the other book.

My footnotes constitute my list of sources that I think readers would most benefit from consulting. A glossary of literary terms appears at the end of the book.

Wheaton College

August 1992

Introduction

Reading the Bible as Literature

There was a man who had two sons."

The Lord is my shepherd.

Behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns.

If these excerpts were the only information that we had about the Bible, they would be enough to dispel a common misconception. Because the Bible is a book with religious authority, we tend to assume that it is a theology book. But if we look at how the Bible presents its material, it resembles a literary work more than anything else. It is filled with stories, poems, visions, and letters. The thing that it is emphatically not is what we so often picture it as being—a theological outline with proof texts attached.

To say that the Bible is a very literary book should not be controversial. The approaches of biblical scholars are becoming more literary with every passing year. An expository sermon on a biblical passage has more in common with a literary approach to the Bible than with traditional methods of biblical scholarship. The purpose of this introduction is to explore what it means to approach the Bible as literature.

What Kind of Book Is the Bible?

The Bible is unique. Part of its uniqueness is the combination of material that we find in it. Three types of writing predominate and are intermingled throughout the Bible. I will call them theological or moral exposition, history, and literature.

The Three Types of Writing in the Bible

By theological exposition I mean this type of material:

But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. . . . For by grace you have been saved through faith. [Eph. 2:4–8]

The leading features of such writing are obvious. The governing purpose is to convey theological or moral information. Such writing is strongly conceptual, and the vocabulary tends toward abstraction with such words as love, mercy, grace, and faith. The basic strategy is to tell us about the subject, not (as in literature) to recreate an experience. It appeals to our intellectual grasp of prepositional truth.

A second type of writing in the Bible is historical. It shares with theological writing the impulse to convey information. Here is a specimen:

In the thirty-eighth year of Asa king of Judah, Ahab the son of Omri began to reign over Israel. . . . And Ahab the son of Omri did evil in the sight of the LORD more than all that were before him. . . . He erected an altar for Baal in the house of Baal, which he built in Samaria. . . . Ahab did more to provoke the LORD, the God of Israel, to anger than all the kings of Israel who were before him. [1 Kings 16:29–33]

Such writing is governed by the documentary impulse to record the facts of the matter. Like the previous selection, it is expository or informational writing. Writing like this aims to tell us what happened and does not share the preoccupation of literature to tell us what happens universally. Historical writing in the Bible does not tell only the facts of the matter, however. It obviously puts the historical facts into an interpretive moral and spiritual framework in which, for example, the writer does not hesitate to align himself against Ahab.

The third dominant type of writing in the Bible is literature. Here is an example:

¹Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’? ²And the woman said to the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; ³but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ⁴But the serpent said to the woman, You will not die. ⁵For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. ⁶So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate. ⁷Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons. [Gen. 3:1–7]

The passage appeals primarily to our imagination (our image-making and image-perceiving capacity). The governing purpose is to recreate the actual scene and event in sufficient detail that we can imaginatively experience them. The writer even quotes the very speeches of the characters, and nothing can be more actual and concrete than that.

The writer’s chief aim in this passage is to tell a story, not to develop a theological argument. Whereas expository writing gives us the precept, literature incarnates the precept in an example—an example that does not simply illustrate the truth but is itself the meaning. A work of literature is incarnational—it embodies meaning. The customary literary terminology for talking about this is to say that the writer of literature shows rather than tells.

The story of the fall illustrates this distinction particularly well. The writer tells us that the serpent was subtle. The subsequent action shows us that subdety. Several things are subde about the serpent’s opening question, Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’? Even to state it as a question implies incredulity over a command by God that is made to appear unreasonable and arbitrary. The serpent also subtly amplifies the prohibition by speaking of how God has said that Adam and Eve cannot eat of any tree of the garden. The cleverness of the serpent is further demonstrated in verses 4 and 5, where he adopts a more aggressive stance by directly contradicting God, by giving Eve a motivation for eating the fruit, by cloaking his evil intention as benevolent concern for Eve, and by instilling in Eve the false belief that she can eat the forbidden fruit with impunity.

As we read the story of the fall, we sense that it tells us not only what happened on that fatal day, but also what happens in human experience generally. A literary passage like this is filled with recognizable human experiences. Here we relive such common experiences as temptation, sin, and guilt.

The Mixture of Theology, History, and Literature

These, then, are the three impulses that we find intertwined throughout the Bible. One of them usually dominates a given passage, but not necessarily to the exclusion of the others. The theological excerpt from Ephesians contains such metaphors as God’s being rich and people’s being dead in sin and our being made to sit with Christ. The historical account of King Ahab in the second excerpt offers a spiritual and moral assessment of him and thus implies a theological outlook. The story of the fall in the third excerpt is theologically important and obeys the historical impulse to record what happened.

Given this mixture of types in the Bible, it is obvious that the same passage can be approached from different perspectives and with different interpretive methods. In addition to thinking in terms of three types of writing, therefore, we also have to be aware that there are three interpretive approaches to the Bible. The theological approach is primarily concerned with the moral and theological ideas contained in a passage. The historical approach is preoccupied with the actual characters and events about which biblical authors write. A literary approach focuses on the features of texts that I will explore in more detail in the remainder of this introduction—the experiential concreteness of the text, the use of literary genres, the artistry with which the material is presented (with particular emphasis on unity), and literary resources of language.

Literature as a Genre

Genre is the literary term for a type or kind of writing. Story, for example, is a literary genre having identifiable characteristics. A literary approach to the Bible is based on an awareness that literature itself is a genre, and it is my purpose in the next several pages to identify its leading traits.

Imaging Reality

The most obvious feature of literature is that it images its subject matter. It prefers the concrete to the abstract. This is why it is often called imaginative literature: it appeals to our image-making and image-perceiving capacity. The result is that the subject of literature is not abstract information but human experience.

The tendency of literature to speak a language of images is most apparent in poetry:

Lead thou me

to the rock that is higher than I;

for thou art my refuge,

a strong tower against the enemy.

Let me dwell in thy tent for ever!

Oh to be safe under the shelter of thy wings! [Ps. 61:2–4]

Storytellers follow the same impulse to present human experience rather than to tell about it. They do so with such techniques as description, dialogue, and the actions of characters.

In sum, we can tell that a text is literary by its tendency to incarnate ideas in the form of poetic images, stories of characters in action, and situations in which readers can imaginatively participate. We might say that literature appeals to our understanding through our imagination. Modern psychology has discovered that the human brain assimilates truth in two distinct ways. Rational or abstract thinking tends to engage the left side of the brain, while imagining or intuitive thinking tends to activate the right side of the brain. Truth is more than propositional, and the Bible implicitly acknowledges this by giving us truth partly in a literary medium.

The Bible gives us pictures of life and reality as well as ideas. Its truth sometimes consists of ideas and propositions, but in its literary parts truth often takes the form of truthfulness to reality and human experience. The Bible is true in this way whenever we can say about its portrayal of life, This is the way life is. We assimilate such truth whenever we recognize and experience it as we read, regardless of whether we formulate the truth as a proposition. If we recognize and feel the horror of Cain’s behavior in the story of Cain and Abel, we have grasped the truth of the story.

Traditional approaches to the Bible lean heavily toward the conceptual and doctrinal. This is largely the result of the modern assumption that a person’s world view and conception of truth are intellectual or ideational only. Yet, as a noted theologian rightly says, we are far more image-making and image-using creatures than we usually think ourselves to be and . . . are guided by images in our minds. . . . Man . . . is a being who grasps and shapes reality . . . with the aid of great images, metaphors, and analogies.[1] Whenever we pattern our behavior on models that we have observed, we are imaging reality. A literary approach takes the images of the Bible seriously as something that embodies and communicates truth.

Literary Genres

One of the commonest ways of defining literature is by its literary genres or types. Through the centuries, people have regarded some genres as being literary in nature. Story and poetry are the most notable categories. Other genres, such as theological treatises and historical chronicles, have been regarded as expository (informational) in nature. Other forms of writing can be either literary or expository, depending on how the writer handles them. Letters, sermons, and orations, for example, can become literary if their authors use the techniques that I outline in this introduction.

The concept of literary genre is so important that this book is organized according to different genres. Each genre has its distinctive features and its own rules or principles of operation. As readers, we need to approach passages in the Bible with the right expectations. Our awareness of genre programs our encounter with a biblical text, telling us what to look for and how to interpret what we see.

Because the Bible is an anthology of separate works, it contains a mixture of genres, some of them literary and some nonliterary. The main literary genres in the Bible are narrative or story, poetry (especially lyric poetry), proverb, and visionary writing (including both prophecy and apocalypse). Literary genres that appear less often include satire, epic, tragedy, epithalamion (wedding poem), elegy (funeral poem), drama, and encomium (a work that praises a quality or character type). Historical writing often moves in the direction of literary narrative by virtue of its experiential concreteness or the principles of pattern and artistry that it exhibits. The letters of the New Testament frequently become literary because of their artistic and poetic style.

Artistry

Another criterion of literature is artistry. Literature is an art form, characterized by beauty, craftsmanship, and technique. With literature, we focus not only on what is said but also on how it is said.

Literary artistry includes both skill with words and patterned composition. The elements of artistic form that all the arts share include pattern or design, theme or central focus, organic unity (also called unity in variety), coherence, balance, contrast, symmetry, repetition or recurrence, and unified progression. Subsequent chapters in this book will ring the changes on these motifs.

The purposes of artistry are at least two: artistry intensifies the impact of an utterance and is pleasurable for its own sake. Both of these purposes are well illustrated by Jesus’ discourse about anxiety in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 6:25–34), as the following outline in figure 1 suggests.

Figure 1   The outline of Jesus’ discourse on anxiety (Matt. 6:25–34)

Resources of Language

Literature uses special resources of language such as metaphor, simile, pun, allusion, paradox, and irony. Word play is particularly important in the literature of the Bible, and not just in the poetic parts. Although these resources of language are not limited to literary writing, they appear in much greater concentration in literary writing.

In addition to these individual linguistic devices, literary texts frequently possess rhetorical patterns. An example is the parallelism of biblical poetry, in which two or more consecutive clauses are arranged in similar grammatical form. Any language pattern that strikes us as unusually patterned might qualify as an example of literary rhetoric: series of questions or statements that follow a common pattern, rhetorical questions (which are asked for the sake of effect rather than to elicit information), question-and-answer constructions, imaginary dialogues, and the aphoristic conciseness of a proverb.

Literary language calls attention to itself. It strikes us as more carefully crafted or more concentrated than ordinary discourse. In one way or another, it tries to do more with language than straightforward expository prose does. By this criterion, too, the Bible is a literary book.

A Test Case: The Account of Peter’s Denial of Jesus

The story of Peter’s denial of Jesus (Luke 22:54–62) provides a good illustration of my generalizations about what makes a text literary. The story is as follows:

⁵⁴Then they seized [Jesus] and led him away, bringing him into the high priest’s house. Peter followed at a distance; ⁵⁵and when they had kindled a fire in the middle of the courtyard and sat down together, Peter sat among them. ⁵⁶Then a maid, seeing him as he sat in the light and gazing at him, said, This man also was with him. ⁵⁷But he denied it, saying, Woman, I do not know him. ⁵⁸And a little later some one else saw him and said, You also are one of them. But Peter said, Man, I am not. ⁵⁹And after an interval of about an hour still another insisted, saying, Certainly this man also was with him; for he is a Galilean. ⁶⁰But Peter said, Man, I do not know what you are saying. And immediately, while he was still speaking, the cock crowed. ⁶¹And the Lord turned and looked at Peter. And Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said to him, Before the cock crows today, you will deny me three times. ⁶²And he went out and wept bitterly.

The passage is thoroughly experiential. The writer makes sure that we see and hear what happened in the courtyard. In fact, the stage directions are written right into this drama in miniature: a maid, seeing him in the light and gazing at him, said. . . . There is equal vividness in the time sequence: after an interval of about an hour, and immediately, while he was still speaking. . . . Luke also quotes the actual dialogue of the participants in the action. There are so many appeals to our imagination that we recreate the denial in vivid detail.

Literature works by a process of indirection. A story like this gives us the example and asks us to find the idea or theme. The story, moreover, gives us a picture of denial instead of a prepositional statement. In fact, it is hard to state the meaning of the story as a generalization. It is the picture that counts. The whole story is the meaning. We experience the reality of denial and feel how it happens in a person’s life instead of theorizing about it.

The account obviously belongs to the literary genre of narrative or story. As such, it has three main ingredients—setting, characters, and plot or action. The setting comes alive in our imagination with its references to a fire in the middle of the courtyard and Peter’s sitting in the light. The setting is historical rather than fictional, and it is an utterly realistic scene of spectators outside a courtroom. The characters, too, are not fictional but come to us straight from the annals of history. The protagonist (the person with whom we go through the event) is Peter. The other chief character is Jesus. The additional people are accessory figures, necessary to the action but for purposes of the story not important in themselves.

We might think that in writing this historical account of an event Luke would be indifferent to how he told the story, but in fact the story is full of artistry. The story has shapeliness and a sense of directed movement. Like most brief stories, it falls into three parts. Verses 54 and 55 set the scene and introduce Peter into it. Verses 56–61 then narrate the main action. Verse 62 dismisses Peter from the scene. The story thus has what Aristotle said every good story must have—a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The central part of the story falls into a pattern frequently found in stories and known as threefold repetition. The pattern that is repeated in this story is accusation followed by denial. In telling the story, the writer does what storytellers usually do: he portrays the central character in a situation that tests him. Here Peter’s loyalty to Jesus is tested. Equally conventional is the element of plot conflict underlying the action (Peter versus three accusers and at the end Jesus).

The most customary way to end a story is to have the protagonist experience a moment of epiphany (insight or illumination). In this story, the crowing of the rooster and the look of Jesus bring Peter to a sudden realization of what he has done. As readers we reach the moment of illumination with Peter. The climax is all the more forceful for having been set up earlier in the account of what happened on the evening of Jesus’ arrest when Peter had boasted that he would never abandon Jesus (Luke 22:31–34).

The special resource of language that permeates this passage is irony. Dramatic irony consists of discrepancy between what we as readers know and the ignorance of characters in the story. In this story, we are aware, as Peter is not, that he is unwittingly fulfilling Jesus’ prediction that Peter would deny him. There is also the irony of Peter’s denying what everyone around the fire knows to be true.