Leland Ryken - How to Read the Bible as Literature: . . . and Get More Out of It

The one thing the Bible is not is what it is so often thought to bea theological outline with proof texts attached.

Asked to define neighbor, Jesus told a story (Luke 10:2527). Likewise, Jesus aphoristic command Remember Lots wife (Luke 17:32) shows that he believed that truth can be embodied in concrete examples or images as well as in moral propositions.

When asked by his disciples why he spoke in parables, Jesus outlined a theory of communication (Matt. 13:1017) based on the literary principle of indirection: he concealed the truth from immediate perception in order to reveal it to listeners who were willing to ponder his parables. Instances from the life of Jesus such as these suggest a literary approach to truth that frequently avoids direct propositional statement and embodies truth in distinctly literary forms.

Furthermore, there is a preoccupation among biblical writers with artistry, verbal craftsmanship, and aesthetic beauty. The writer of Ecclesiastes presents a theory of writing that stresses beauty of expression as well as truthfulness of content; he labored to arrange proverbs with great care and sought to find pleasing words (Eccl. 12:910 RSV ). If the Bible is an artistically beautiful as well as a truthful book, it demands a literary approach in addition to the historical and theological approaches.

Traditionally, we have been so preoccupied with the hermeneutical question of how to interpret what the Bible says that we have been left impoverished in techniques to describe and interact with the text itself. In the thirteenth century, Roger Bacon argued that the church had done a good job of communicating the theological content of the Bible but had failed to make the literal level of the biblical text come alive in peoples imaginations. We are in a similar situation today, even though the literary emphasis on the primary or literal level of a biblical text actually builds upon the grammatico-historical method of interpretation, which likewise aims to take a reader as close as possible to the originally intended, plain meaning of the text.

This book is an introduction to the literary forms of the Bible, with emphasis on the activities that those forms require of a reader. It is a grammar of literary forms and techniques. As such, it is a companion or supplement to similar handbooks by biblical scholars.

I am happy for this occasion to thank my Wheaton College colleagues Alan Johnson of the Bible Department and Jim Wilhoit of the Christian Education Department for their unfailing helpfulness in pointing me to material from their disciplines and in sparing me from errors of ignorance. This book also benefited from criticism by Ron Allen of Western Conservative Baptist Seminary and Stanley Gundry, Editor-in-Chief at Zondervan. I am equally indebted to my wife, Mary, for serving as stylistic critic and proofreader.

I have taken most of my biblical quotations from the New International Version. Where I have used the King James Version ( KJ ) or the Revised Standard Version ( RSV ), I have so indicated.