The Complete Literary Guide to the Bible

Leland Ryken, Tremper Longman III

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN:
  9780310877424
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

A Complete Literary Guide to the Bible is consideration of the Bible from a literary perspective, reflecting contemporary interest in the academic world of the Bible as literature. This collection of essays addresses both specific books of the Bible and general topics dealing with the Bible. The four main sections of the book are; The Bible as Literature, The Literature of the Old Testament, The Literature of the New Testament, and The Literary Influence of the Bible.

The editors for A Complete Literary Guide to the Bible are Leland Ryken and Tremper Longman III.  Contributors include:

• Fredrick Buechner, Novelist
• John Sailhamer, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
• Wilson G. Baroody, Arizona State University
• William F. Gentrup, Arizona State University
• Kenneth R.R. Gros, Louis Indiana University
• Willard Van Antwerpen, Indiana University
• Nancy Tischler, The Pennsylvania State University
• Michael Hagan, North American Baptist Seminary
• Richard L. Pratt, Jr., Reformed Theological Seminary
• Douglas Green, Yale University
• Wilma McClarty, Southern College
• Jerry A. Gladson, First Christian Church, Garden Grove, California
• Raymond C. Van Leeouwen, Calvin Theological Seminary
• Richard Patterson, Liberty University
• James H. Sims, The University of Southern Mississippi
• Branson L. Woodard, Jr. Liberty University
• Amberys R. Whittle, Georgia Southern University
• John H. Augustine, Yale University
• Michael Travers, Grand Rapids Baptist College
• Marianne Meye Thompson, Fuller Theological Seminary
• John W. Sider, Westmont College
• Carey C. Newman, Palm Beach Atlantic College
• William G. Doty, The University of Alabama/Tuscaloosa
• Chaim Potak, Novelist
• Gene Warren Doty, University of Missouri-Rolla
• Sidney Greidanus, Calvin Theological Seminary

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Part 1

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

LELAND RYKEN AND TREMPER LONGMAN III

Wheaton College

Westminster Theological Seminary

At a time when scholars and publishers are eager to claim that their approach to the Bible is literary, it has become a common practice to accept all claims as valid. As editors of this volume we have not taken this easy way out. To accept every piece of commentary as literary that claims to be such undermines the credibility of the very concept of a literary approach to the Bible. The purpose of this chapter is to define what we mean by a literary approach to the Bible, to identify differing emphases among literary critics and biblical scholars, and to provide an overview of some leading literary traits of the Bible.

The Literary Study of the Bible

Biblical scholars have been using the terms literature and literary criticism for at least half a century, but until recently they did not define these terms in the same way that literary scholars in the humanities did. Two decades ago Amos Wilder rightly recorded his “astonishment that the term ‘literary criticism’ should have such different connotations for biblical scholars as for students of literature generally,” noting specifically the preoccupation of biblical scholars with authorship, sources, dating, and purpose as opposed to “those appreciative and interpretive questions which are the goal of criticism everywhere else” (Rhetoric xxii).

Literary critics themselves have presented a splintered scene in recent years, and it is of course impossible to reduce the field to a single approach. Yet as one looks at the deep structure that underlies the amorphous thing called literary criticism in the last half century, it is apparent that the influence of traditional literary criticism remains a subtext for the new approaches that have succeeded each other with accelerating frequency. If we ask what most characterizes traditional literary criticism, the answer is that a concern with genre does, provided that we acknowledge that literature itself constitutes a genre with identifying traits (Fowler 1–19).

To forestall potential resistance, we need to say at once that the Bible is a mixed book that contains three dominant types of material and therefore invites multiple approaches. The three main interests of biblical writers are the theological, the historical, and the literary. The focus of this book is on only one of these, which is not, however, offered as a complete approach. To say that a literary approach is limited in what it can do with a biblical text is to say nothing that cannot be said of any other approach.

It is a truism that each scholarly generation creates its own critical vocabulary, yet certain principles have remained constant under the changing styles of criticism. One is that the subject of literature is human experience, concretely presented. The Classical tradition spoke of literature as an imitation of reality, whereas the Romantic tradition championed the idea that literature is an image of human experience. What both traditions have in common is an assumption that literature does not consist primarily of abstractly stated ideas but of truthfulness to human experience and life.

When a writer comments that his book will “consider how the Bible, as literature, uses images in a great variety of ways” (Fischer 39), we do not need to inquire into the author’s scholarly discipline before we know that the approach is literary. The authentic literary note is similarly sounded by the statement that the stories of the Bible “tell of mankind’s experience at its most moving and most memorable in words that go beyond mere chronicle: words that strike the heart and light up the vision” (Roche xvi). Or, to take another specimen, a literary commentary on the gospel of Luke comments regarding the story of Jesus on the road to Emmaus that “a story is a story is a story. It cannot be boiled down to a meaning. Here the power is in suggestion rather than outright doctrine” (Drury 217). Contrariwise, a piece of scholarship that primarily discusses the ideas or historicity of a biblical text removes itself from what we mean by literary criticism.

Literature enacts rather than states, shows rather than tells. Instead of giving abstract propositions about virtue or vice, for example, literature presents stories of good or evil characters in action. The commandment “you shall not murder” is propositional and direct, while the story of Cain and Abel embodies the same truth in the distinctly literary form of narrative—a narrative, we should note, that does not even use the word murder. When we read a literary text, we do not feel primarily that we have been given new information but rather that we have undergone an experience.

Several corollaries follow from the incarnational nature of literature. One is that literature conveys its meanings by a certain indirectness and therefore calls for interpretation. Novelist Flannery O’Connor claimed that the storyteller speaks “with character and action, not about character and action” (76). About what, then, does the storyteller tell us by means of character and action? About life, human experience, reality, truth. Inherent in O’Connor’s formula is the idea that the indirection of literature places a burden of interpretation on a reader. Literary texts do not come right out and state their themes. They embody them.

This means, in addition, that literary texts are irreducible to propositional statements and single meanings. The whole story or the whole poem is the meaning. A propositional statement of theme can never be a substitute or even the appointed goal of experiencing a literary text. At most it is a lens through which we see the incarnated experiences—something that brings the experiences embodied in the text into focus.

The chapters that follow will have a lot to say about the form in which the Bible comes to us and the relation of that form to ideology, but they will say relatively little about ideas per se. They will have more to say about the human experiences presented in the Bible than about theological ideas. A noted theologian has said that “we are far more image-making and image-using creatures than we usually think ourselves to be and…are guided and formed by images in our minds,” adding that the human race “grasps and shapes reality…with the aid of great images, metaphors, and analogies” (Niebuhr 151–52, 161). The essays in this volume share this literary bias and believe that the Bible confirms it.

With a literary text, form is meaning. This implies that we cannot grasp the truth of story or poem, for example, without first interacting with the story qualities or poetic images. We cannot understand the religious and human themes of the story of Abraham’s offering of Isaac without first reliving the progress of this test story and analyzing the characterization of Abraham and God in the story. The sheep-shepherd metaphor that pervades Psalm 23 itself embodies the truth of the poem. The literary critic’s preoccupation with the forms of biblical literature is more than an aesthetic delight in craftsmanship, though it is not less than that. It is also part of a concern to understand the truth of the text at a deeper level than a propositional summary extracted from the text.

A second identifying trait of literature is its self-conscious artistry. Literature is more saturated with technique and pattern than ordinary writing is. The proportion of commentary devoted to matters of how something is expressed is proportionately higher with a literary text than with an expository text. Literature calls attention to its own technique in a way that ordinary discourse does not. We can legitimately speak of literary writers’ exploiting and even flaunting their verbal and artistic resources. Whereas ordinary discourse is most effective when it is most transparent, pointing efficiently and unambiguously to a body of information, literary writing continually asks us to interact with the “how” of the utterance.

Given the range of contemporary literary approaches, the interest that contributors to this volume show in literary form does not mean just one thing. To some it means an aesthetic interest in artistic form—the delight in something carefully crafted and intricately patterned. To others it is part of a rhetorical interest in how discourse is structured to achieve its effects. Structuralist analysis maintains a strong appeal to biblical scholars who associate certain verbal structures such as repetition and chiasm with the distinctiveness of the Bible. Narratology has its own preoccupation with technique, pattern, and conventions. Robert Alter’s theory of type scenes that carry expectations for both author and reader has elicited the loyalty of many biblical scholars. Underlying the range of current critical approaches, however, is a shared conviction that literature is the result of conscious composition, careful patterning, and an awareness of literary conventions prevalent at the time of writing and subsequently.

A particular manifestation of this preoccupation with literary form and technique is the prominence of genre in literary discussions of the Bible. The contributors to this volume give us variations on the theme that genre is a “norm or expectation to guide the reader in his encounter with the text” (Culler 136). Literary approaches to the Bible agree that an awareness of genre tells us what to look for in a text and how to organize our experience of it. Beyond this descriptive function is a shared assumption that genre also influences how we interpret a biblical text. Northrop Frye sounds the keynote when he says that the “right” interpretation is the one “that conforms to the intentionality of the book itself and to the conventions it assumes and requires” (Great Code 80). Although this statement uses the term that has been such a preoccupation with biblical scholars for half a century—intentionality—we should note that Frye locates intentionality in the text and its conventions, not in the author. This bias is evident in current literary approaches to the Bible (which is not to say that it has obliterated the concern with authorial intention among biblical scholars).

A related feature of literary approaches to the Bible is a focus on the text in its present form and an acceptance of the text as a unified whole. Literary critics have never needed conversion to this viewpoint; it has been their presupposition from time immemorial. Richard Moulton, the early champion of modern literary study of the Bible, said a century ago that “no principle of literary study is more important than that of grasping clearly a literary work as a single whole” (1718).

For biblical scholars to accept this principle has required a shift from the preoccupations of a century or more of scholarship, in which the main activity consisted of conducting excavations into the stages of composition and redaction behind a text and arranging biblical texts into a patchwork of fragments. Before the recent paradigm shift occurred, biblical scholars generally accepted Klaus Koch’s claim that “the literary critic…approaches the text with, so to say, a dissecting knife in his hand…Literary criticism is the analysis of biblical books from the standpoint of lack of continuity, duplications, inconsistencies and different linguistic usage, with the object of discovering what the individual writers and redactors contributed to a text, and also its time and place of origin” (69–70).

In such a critical climate, Northrop Frye’s oft-quoted verdict was nothing less than a throwing down of the gauntlet: “a purely literary criticism would see the Bible, not as the scrapbook of corruptions, glosses, redactions, insertions, conflations, misplacings, and misunderstandings revealed by the analytic critic, but as a typological unity” (Anatomy 315). Today Frye’s claim for unity is axiomatic for anyone claiming to take a literary approach to the Bible. The essays in this book assume the unity of biblical books and are uninterested in how the text came to its present form.

Any approach to the Bible can be formulated as a process of questioning the text. It is easy to summarize a literary approach to the Bible in terms of the questions that it asks of a biblical text. They include the following: What human experiences have been embodied in this text? To what genre(s) does this text belong, and how does an awareness of the relevant generic conventions guide our encounter with the text? What are the unifying patterns and structure of the text? What artistry does the text exhibit? What devices of disclosure has the author encoded in the text to guide our interpretation of its religious and other meanings?

Literary Critics and the Bible

Within the broad areas of agreement noted above, literary critics and biblical scholars continue to pursue their mutual interests with differing emphases and occasional uneasiness about what the other group does with the Bible. We might note in passing that a decade or two ago the previous sentence would have read “rival group” rather than “other group.” In this section and the following one, we discuss what we as representatives of our respective disciplines find distinctive to our literary interest in the Bible and what we find either surprising or potentially troubling when we see members of the other discipline pursue literary analysis of the Bible.

A preliminary point to note is that both groups of scholars become novices when they take their first excursions into the other discipline’s territory. Judged by the expertise of biblical scholars, literary critics of the Bible show obvious shortcomings when they discuss the Bible, especially in such areas as historical context, linguistic nuances of texts in their original languages, and theological sophistication.

Biblical scholars, for all their professed enthusiasm for literary methods, sometimes seem amateurish to literary critics in their use of literary terms and their application of literary methods of analysis. They sometimes seem unable to differentiate good from bad literary methodology, and although they make a good case for a literary approach in the introductory chapters to their commentaries, they quickly lapse into conventional preoccupations when they actually conduct their exploration of a biblical book. The integration between theory and practice sometimes seems deficient. In the present book we attempted to guard against the potential deficiencies of both literary and biblical scholars by having members of the two disciplines critique each other’s chapters.

In the view of literary critics, biblical scholars continue to run the risk of isolating the Bible in an ancient world, sealed off both from the current literary interests of ordinary readers of the Bible and the experience of people today. Several strands make up this tendency.

A historical orientation continues to evidence itself among biblical scholars who share the new interest in the literary nature of the Bible. It has been an axiom from the time of Aristotle that history deals with the particular and literature with the universal. History tells us what happened; literature tells us what happens. The Bible invites both approaches, but biblical scholars do not find it natural to discuss the universal experiences portrayed in a biblical text. They are generally content to discuss the events and characters in the Bible as data of the ancient world, and not to worry about modern applications. To literary critics, biblical literature is a mirror in which we see ourselves. Biblical scholars might not dispute this, but it does not excite their enthusiasm.

In a landmark essay earlier in this century, Krister Stendahl proposed that interpretation of the Bible must be governed by two questions—“what it meant” and “what it means.” By training and temperament, biblical scholars have gravitated toward the first of these and literary critics toward the second, a divergence that quickly surfaced as we collected the essays for this book.

The divergence between “then” and “now” is also evident in the handling of genre. Both groups of scholars believe that biblical texts will yield their meanings most fully if approached in terms of their genres. But the genres that the two groups apply to the Bible only partly overlap. Literary critics apply the generic considerations with which they are familiar in their study of English, American, and comparative literature. Biblical scholars show ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part 1
• PART 2
• PART 3
• PART 4
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright
• About the Publisher
• Consumer Engagement