nandant berteana waunakee
Chanelle Glugla
As I have plied my trade as a spokesman for the Bible as literature for half a century, I have adopted a strategy of first clearing the ground of misconceptions and then making the positive case for the importance of reading and interpreting the Bible in keeping with its literary nature. Because the phrase the Bible as literature came on the scene in the middle of the twentieth century, it is understandable that evangelicals might be suspicious of the idea. But such towering theological stalwarts from the past as Augustine, Luther, and Calvin did not doubt that the Bible has literary qualities.
Most literature is fictional at some level, but fictionality is not a defining trait of literature. A piece of writing is literary whenever authors employ literary techniques, regardless of whether they record what really happened or made it up.
To people unfamiliar with the literary approach to the Bible, it may seem that literary scholars are adding something to the Bible, but this is a false impression. When we interact with the Bible using literary tools of analysis, we are not adding something but are discovering what is already in the text. We could not treat the story of Samson as a literary tragedy if it did not possess the qualities of that genre.
Several qualities make a text literary, and it is easy to overlook the most basic and universal principle of literature. That principle concerns the content of literature. Literature takes human experience as its subject. When we read a work of literature, we share an experience. Literature is truthful to life and experience and is not primarily a delivery system for an idea. A literary approach to the Bible identifies and relives the human experiences that are portrayed and avoids reducing the Bible to a set of ideas.
Professors who teach literature and creative writing claim that literature shows rather than tells. To "show" is to embody concretely; to "tell" is to express an abstraction or idea. The sixth commandment tells us "you shall not murder." The story of Cain and Abel (Gen. 4:1-16) shows and embodies that truth, and it does so without using the abstraction murder and without commanding us to refrain from it. When the rich young ruler asked Jesus to define neighbor, Jesus instead told a story (the parable of the good Samaritan) that shows us what neighborly behavior looks like. A literary approach to the Bible interacts with the embodied experiences that biblical authors place before us.
God did not neglect beauty when he created the world, and he did not neglect it when he superintended the composition of the Bible. The literary parts of the Bible are replete with artistry, and to pay attention to it and unfold it through analysis is an important part of a literary approach to the Bible. Doing so can add a whole new dimension and level of enjoyment to our reading and study of the Bible. Additionally, we need to operate on the premise that biblical authors regarded everything that they put into their works as important and worthy of our attention, including artistic aspects.
Because most evangelicals pay scant attention to the literary nature of the Bible, the misconception gets perpetuated that the literary approach is specialized and technical. In fact all it requires is that we carry over what we know about literature generally to the Bible. We have all had high school or college literature courses in which we learned that plot, setting, and character are the elements of a story, and that poets think in images and figures of speech. All we need to do is put what we already know into practice when we read and interpret the Bible.
Leland Ryken (PhD, University of Oregon) served as professor of English at Wheaton College for nearly fifty years. He served as literary stylist for the English Standard Version Bible and has authored or edited over sixty books, including The Word of God in English and A Complete Handbook of Literary Forms in the Bible.
The Bible (from Koine Greek τὰ βιβλία, t bibla, 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures, some, all, or a variant of which are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, Islam, the Baha'i Faith, and other Abrahamic religions. The Bible is an anthology (a compilation of texts of a variety of forms) originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek. The texts include instructions, stories, poetry, prophecies, and other genres. The collection of materials that are accepted as part of the Bible by a particular religious tradition or community is called a biblical canon. Believers in the Bible generally consider it to be a product of divine inspiration, but the way they understand what that means and interpret the text varies.
The religious texts were compiled by different religious communities into various official collections. The earliest contained the first five books of the Bible, called the Torah in Hebrew and the Pentateuch (meaning five books) in Greek. The second-oldest part was a collection of narrative histories and prophecies (the Nevi'im). The third collection (the Ketuvim) contains psalms, proverbs, and narrative histories. "Tanakh" is an alternate term for the Hebrew Bible composed of the first letters of those three parts of the Hebrew scriptures: the Torah ("Teaching"), the Nevi'im ("Prophets"), and the Ketuvim ("Writings"). The Masoretic Text is the medieval version of the Tanakh, in Hebrew and Aramaic, that is considered the authoritative text of the Hebrew Bible by modern Rabbinic Judaism. The Septuagint is a Koine Greek translation of the Tanakh from the third and second centuries BC; it largely overlaps with the Hebrew Bible.
Christianity began as an outgrowth of Second Temple Judaism, using the Septuagint as the basis of the Old Testament. The early Church continued the Jewish tradition of writing and incorporating what it saw as inspired, authoritative religious books. The gospels, Pauline epistles, and other texts quickly coalesced into the New Testament.
With estimated total sales of over five billion copies, the Bible is the best-selling publication of all time. It has had a profound influence both on Western culture and history and on cultures around the globe. The study of it through biblical criticism has indirectly impacted culture and history as well. The Bible is currently translated or is being translated into about half of the world's languages.
The English word Bible is derived from Koinē Greek: τὰ βιβλία, romanized: ta biblia, meaning "the books" (singular βιβλίον, biblion).[2]The word βιβλίον itself had the literal meaning of "scroll" and came to be used as the ordinary word for "book".[3] It is the diminutive of βύβλος byblos, "Egyptian papyrus", possibly so called from the name of the Phoenician sea port Byblos (also known as Gebal) from whence Egyptian papyrus was exported to Greece.[4]
The Greek ta biblia ("the books") was "an expression Hellenistic Jews used to describe their sacred books".[5] The biblical scholar F. F. Bruce notes that John Chrysostom appears to be the first writer (in his Homilies on Matthew, delivered between 386 and 388 CE) to use the Greek phrase ta biblia ("the books") to describe both the Old and New Testaments together.[6]
Latin biblia sacra "holy books" translates Greek τὰ βιβλία τὰ ἅγια (t bibla t hgia, "the holy books").[7] Medieval Latin biblia is short for biblia sacra "holy book". It gradually came to be regarded as a feminine singular noun (biblia, gen. bibliae) in medieval Latin, and so the word was loaned as singular into the vernaculars of Western Europe.[8]
The Bible is not a single book; it is a collection of books whose complex development is not completely understood. The oldest books began as songs and stories orally transmitted from generation to generation. Scholars of the twenty-first century are only in the beginning stages of exploring "the interface between writing, performance, memorization, and the aural dimension" of the texts. Current indications are that writing and orality were not separate so much as ancient writing was learned in a context of communal oral performance.[9] The Bible was written and compiled by many people, who many scholars say are mostly unknown, from a variety of disparate cultures and backgrounds.[10]
The earliest manuscripts were probably written in paleo-Hebrew, a kind of cuneiform pictograph similar to other pictographs of the same period.[15] The exile to Babylon most likely prompted the shift to square script (Aramaic) in the fifth to third centuries BCE.[16] From the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Hebrew Bible was written with spaces between words to aid in reading.[17] By the eighth century CE, the Masoretes added vowel signs.[18] Levites or scribes maintained the texts, and some texts were always treated as more authoritative than others.[19] Scribes preserved and changed the texts by changing the script and updating archaic forms while also making corrections. These Hebrew texts were copied with great care.[20]
Considered to be scriptures (sacred, authoritative religious texts), the books were compiled by different religious communities into various biblical canons (official collections of scriptures).[21] The earliest compilation, containing the first five books of the Bible and called the Torah (meaning "law", "instruction", or "teaching") or Pentateuch ("five books"), was accepted as Jewish canon by the fifth century BCE. A second collection of narrative histories and prophesies, called the Nevi'im ("prophets"), was canonized in the third century BCE. A third collection called the Ketuvim ("writings"), containing psalms, proverbs, and narrative histories, was canonized sometime between the second century BCE and the second century CE.[22] These three collections were written mostly in Biblical Hebrew, with some parts in Aramaic, which together form the Hebrew Bible or "TaNaKh" (an abbreviation of "Torah", "Nevi'im", and "Ketuvim").[23]
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