Words of Delight

A Literary Introduction to the Bible

Ryken, Leland

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 1993
• ISBN:
  9781585580637
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In this introduction to Scripture, Leland Ryken organizes biblical passages into literary genres including narratives, poetry, proverbs, and drama, demonstrating that knowledge of a genre's characteristics enriches one's understanding of individual passages. Ryken offers a volume brimming over with wonderful insights into Old and New Testament books and passages--insights that have escaped most traditional commentators.

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Introducing Biblical Narrative

What You Should Know About the Stories of the Bible

One of the most universal human impulses can be summed up in a familiar four-word plea: Tell me a story. The Bible constantly satisfies that demand. Narrative is the dominant form of the Bible. Despite the multiplicity of literary genres found in the Bible, it is above all a book of stories.

If you doubt this, imagine yourself trying to describe the content of the Bible to someone who has never read the Bible. You would very quickly find yourself describing what happens in the Bible, and to “tell what happens” is to tell a story. It is no wonder that Henry R. Luce, founder of Time magazine, quipped, “Time didn’t start this emphasis on stories about people; the Bible did.”

The stories of the Bible are both like and unlike the stories with which we are generally familiar. The purpose of this chapter is to outline some common tendencies of biblical narrative.

Realism

One of the dominant literary characteristics of Bible stories is their thoroughgoing realism. Several things combine to create this quality.

For one thing, biblical storytellers are at pains to place their stories in space-time history. Most stories in the Bible begin something like this:

And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother’s son, and all their possessions which they had . . . gotten in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. [Gen. 12:5–6]

This matter-of-fact approach produces passages that read more like entries in a diary or biography or history book than an ordinary story.

The impulse of the storytellers in the Bible is to give a circumstantial and factual basis to their stories. The result is what literary scholars call realism. Literary realism shares with history and biography the quality of being empirical (rooted in observable reality).

We also associate realism with the tendency to be concrete, vivid, and specific. Despite the extreme brevity of most stories in the Bible, there are constant appeals to our imagination. The realism in the story of Ehud’s assassination of Eglon is typical:

And Ehud reached with his left hand, took the sword from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly; and the hilt also went in after the blade, and the fat closed over the blade, for he did not draw the sword out of his belly; and the dirt [dung] came out. Then Ehud went out into the vestibule, and closed the doors of the roof chamber upon him, and locked them. [Judg. 3:21–23]

A storyteller cannot get more realistic than this. We visualize everything from the movements of Ehud to the disappearing knife. Part of the realism of Bible stories is the refusal of writers to omit sordid actions in the name of niceness. The stories of the Bible are of the earth, earthy.

We also associate realism with the portrayal of unidealized human behavior. By this criterion, too, the Bible is a realistic book. It paints its characters as Cromwell wished to be painted—warts and all. What a biblical scholar said about the patriarchs of Genesis is true of most biblical characters: they are so deeply flawed that “they have almost more shadow than light.”[1] Among fully developed characters in the Bible, only a handful are wholly idealized characters: Joseph (some would dispute even him), Ruth, Daniel, Jesus.

Another thing that links the stories of the Bible with literary realism is their focus on common experience and characters of average social standing. The stories of the Bible are full of minor characters and ordinary people who are named and treated as significant in the stories. This is in sharp contrast to ancient stories like the epics of Homer, where only aristocratic characters count for much and people of lesser standing are a nameless, faceless crew.

Individuality is important in the Bible. We find lists of names of people who carried the tabernacle (Num. 10), came back to the Promised Land (Ezra 2), rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem (Neh. 3), and who were priests, gatekeepers, and singers in Jerusalem under David, along with those who mixed spices and made the flat cakes for worship (1 Chron. 9). And this is to say nothing of that great favorite of biblical writers, the genealogy.

There is an equal attention to common, everyday events. In Genesis we learn such seemingly insignificant things as the fact that Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in Beersheba (21:33), Isaac had several disputes with neighbors over a well (26:17–22), Rebekah’s nurse was buried under an oak below Bethel (35:8), and Joseph shaved and changed his clothes before going to see Pharaoh (41:14). My personal favorite among the mundane events recorded in the stories of the Bible is the startling information that Benaiah “slew a lion in a pit on a day when snow had fallen” (1 Chron. 11:22).

The Bible conveys an astonishing sense of reality. The one charge that I have never seen leveled against the stories of the Bible is that the characters are not real. Wherever we turn, we find ourselves and our acquaintances.

The realism of biblical narrative is also part of its religious meaning As we read these stories, we quickly sense that they have no intention of relegating the religious side of life to some other, spiritual world. Here the workings of God reach down into earthly experience. In the words of Erich Auerbach, the Bible “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.”[2]

Literary Romance

If the stories of the Bible have the literary traits of realism, they also possess the qualities of a type of story that is in many ways the exact opposite and that literary scholars call romance. This is the type of story that delights in the extraordinary and miraculous. Like romance stories, the stories of the Bible are full of mystery, the supernatural, and the heroic.

Romance stories are replete with adventure, battle, capture and rescue, surprise, the exotic and marvelous, poetic justice (good characters are rewarded and bad ones punished), and happy endings. Such stories tend to portray life as we desire it to be: the underdog wins, the villain gets his just punishment, the slave girl marries the king, the dead come back to life.

The Bible’s resemblance to this type of story is obvious. Its stories are filled with adventure, marvelous events, battles of many kinds, danger, supernatural characters, villains who get what they deserve, witches, heroes and heroines, an occasional talking animal, dragons, dungeons, castles, giants, quests, shipwrecks, captures and rescues, kings and queens, romantic love, and a few boy heroes. Bible stories, moreover, tend to be happy-ending stories in which good characters win and bad ones lose.

The story of God’s rescue of Elisha when he was surrounded by the Syrian army in the town of Dothan epitomizes the romance quality of the stories of the Bible:

When the servant of the man of God rose early in the morning and went out, behold, an army with horses and chariots was round about the city. And the servant said, “Alas, my master! What shall we do?” He said, “Fear not, for us are more than those who are with them.” . . . So the LORD opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw; and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha. And when the Syrians came down against him, Elisha prayed to the LORD, and said, “Strike this people, I pray thee, with blindness.” So he struck them with blindness. . . . [2 Kings 6:15–18]

Here we are at an opposite pole from everyday realism. We are in a world of supernatural marvels that transcends the world of physical, earthly reality.

The Bible as a whole ends with an abundance of literary conventions that are familiar to us through our reading of fairy tales: a lady in distress who is miraculously rescued (Rev. 12:13–16), a hero who kills a dragon (Rev. 19:11–20:3), a wicked witch who is finally defeated (Rev. 17–18), the marriage of the triumphant hero to his bride and the celebration of the wedding with a feast (Rev. 19:6–8), and the description of a palace glittering with jewels in which the hero and his bride live happily ever after (Rev. 21).

It is no wonder that the stories of the Bible appeal to children. Nor is it surprising that they merge in a child’s imagination with romance stories. I can recall an occasion when my daughter, then aged five, recommended that I select “the story of Gideon, and his knights, and their fiery swords.”

Along with this literary appeal, the romance side of the Bible’s stories embodies an important religious message. In the Bible, reality exists at two levels—the physical, earthly realm, and the unseen spiritual world. Both are equally real. The supernatural orientation, and especially the miraculous intervention of God in earthly events, constantly opens up doors into the spiritual world. If, as I said earlier, the realism of biblical narrative shows us God’s reaching down into earthly reality, the romance element in biblical narrative shows us the complementary way in which earthly life opens up into a spiritual world. Religious experience in the stories of the Bible is more than earthly, though the realism of these stories shows at the same time that it is not less than earthly.

The Double Quality of Bible Stories

The stories of the Bible combine the two tendencies of narrative that have most appealed to the human race and that we tend to think of as opposites. These stories are both factually realistic and romantically marvelous. They bring together two impulses that the human race is always trying to join—reason and imagination, fact and mystery. The stories of the Bible nourish our need for both down-to-earth reality and the more-than-earthly. They appeal both to that part of us that is firmly planted on the earth and to that part of us that soars to the heavens.

The stories of the Bible call for both a naive and a sophisticated literary response. They are both adult stories and children’s stories. On the one hand, they are folk stories—brief, realisitic, vivid, uncomplicated in plot line. They are stories that elicit intuitive responses from children. Looking back at my own childhood responses to them, I can tell that my responses to such things as dramatic irony or poetic justice or characterization were usually the right ones, even though I lacked the literary terminology to name them.

But the stories of the Bible also ask of us a sophisticated response. Part of this is the ability to deal with what today we would call adult themes—violence, sex, deceit, death, the subtleties of tension in personal relations, and the ambiguous mixture of good and evil in people’s character and actions.

Bible stories often carry a surface meaning that no one can miss, combined with difficult issues that require complex interpretive skills to notice and unravel. Consider the story of Joseph:

Joseph, being seventeen years old, was shepherding the flock with his brothers; . . . and Joseph brought an ill report of them to their father. Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his children, because he was the son of his old age; and he made him a long robe with sleeves. But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him. . . . [Gen. 37:2–4]

The surface level is one that children are perhaps the best at picking up: this is a story built around such universal domestic experiences as sibling rivalry, parental favoritism, and tattling. At the level of the human experience that is presented, the story packs an immediate punch.

But questions arise when we stare at the passage more closely, or when we pick up more experience of life. All the simple reader needs to know is that Jacob favored his son Joseph. But the narrator invites us to consider an added level of human dynamics and psychology when he includes the explanation that Jacob preferred Joseph “because he was the son of his old age.”

For the reader who is busy emoting over the sibling rivalry that is portrayed here, the important thing is that the younger brother tattled on his older brothers. But the more thoughtful reader wants to know whether this is good or bad behavior on Joseph’s part. These two readings will lead to opposite conclusions on the question. To young people with an ingrained reaction against tattling, Joseph is a goody-goody who deserves much of what he gets. But we reach another assessment if we take a bigger view of the moral principle involved. The obligation to testify of wrong is necessary to the health of any society, and it became an Old Testament civil law (Lev. 5:1). Joseph, moreover, dissociates himself from a (quite literal) brotherhood of evil, and he shows an allegiance in the hierarchy of authority upward to his father rather than to his brothers.

How serious is it when two readings contradict each other in this way? It naturally influences how readers interpret the specific, local details in a story, but it very rarely determines how they interpret the overall meaning of a biblical story. Regardless of whether we think the youthful Joseph was an unsympathetic spoiled brat or a young man with unusual moral conscience and courage, our final understanding of the providential theme in the story as a whole will be the same. The stories of the Bible often communicate as much as our own range and depth of human experience equip us to see in them. These stories, someone has noted, are hard to interpret correctly but also are nearly impossible to totally misread:

By foolproof composition I mean that the Bible is difficult to read, easy to underread and overread and even misread, but virtually impossible to . . . counterread. . . . The essentials are made transparent to all comers: the story line, the world order, the value system. The old and new controversies among exegetes, spreading to every possible topic, must not blind us (as it usually does them) to the measure of agreement in this regard.[3]

There is another way in which the stories of the Bible invite a double response. They are so filled with vivid (often spectacular) action that they focus our attention on what happened. At this level they invite us to lose ourselves in the story and not be preoccupied with how the story is told. We might consider this an unliterary reading of the stories in the sense that it is unconscious of artistic matters. Such a reading is an intuitive, self-forgetful absorption in the action.

But the stories of the Bible are so carefully and subtly crafted that they also invite a more conscious analysis of their literary composition. They exhibit a perfection of literary technique that can scarcely be accidental and that definitely allows for sophisticated literary analysis. There should be no doubt that the storytellers of the Bible were interested in narrative technique. Their stories are not randomly composed. They are small masterpieces, and analysis is capable of showing this. Among other things, this opens up an additional avenue for enjoying the stories and one that most people find interesting.

A final element of doubleness that we should note is that as readers we fill a double role. We are both spectators and participants as we go through the action. As participants we identify with the characters as the action unfolds. We become spectators whenever we sense a distance between ourselves and the characters in the story. This is not to deny that we are imaginatively present in the world of the story. But we are conscious that the action is not happening to us. In this regard we should not minimize that the Bible is ancient literature and that much about the actions and customs in Bible stories is strange to us.

We are normally both participants and spectators as we read the stories of the Bible. The extent to which we are one or the other depends partly on our own background of experiences. In both cases, we must make an act of the imagination in leaving our own time and place and entering a world remote from our own. The act of identifying with characters in stories has been somewhat overemphasized in literary theory, so let me underscore that there is nothing deficient in our reading when...