How Bible Stories Work E-Book

Leland Ryken

• Herausgeber: Lexham Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Reading the Bible as Literature
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 172

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

This is the first of a projected six-volume series called Reading the Bible as Literature (the second volume being Sweeter Than Honey, Richer Than Gold). An expert at exploring the intersection of the Bible and literature, Ryken shows pastors and students and teachers of the Bible how to appreciate the craftsmanship and beauty of biblical narrative and how to interpret it correctly. Dr. Ryken goes one step further than merely explaining the genre of story-he includes exercises to help students master this rich literary treasure.

Leseprobe

READING THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE

How Bible Stories Work

A GUIDED STUDY OF BIBLICAL NARRATIVE

LELAND RYKEN

How Bible Stories Work: A Guided Study of Biblical Narrative

© 2015 by Leland Ryken

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

First edition by Weaver Book Company.

All rights reserved. You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [email protected].

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Print ISBN 9781683591528

Digital ISBN 9781683591535

Cover design: Frank Gutbrod

Contents

Series Preface

Introduction:

Getting the Most Out of Biblical Narrative

1.The Subject of Every Story:

The Embodiment of Universal Human Experience

2.Setting in Bible Stories:

Seeing the Particulars

3.Characterization in Bible Stories (Part 1):

How Writers Do It

4.Characterization in Bible Stories (Part 2):

What Readers Need to Do

5.Plot Structure and Unity:

The Beginning, Middle, and Ending of Each Story

6.Plot Devices:

How Storytellers Tell Their Story with Beauty and Skill

7.Hero Stories:

A Neglected but Fruitful Narrative Genre

8.From Story to Meaning:

How to Find Significance in a Narrative Text

Series Preface

This series is part of the mission of the publisher to equip Christians to understand and teach the Bible effectively by giving them reliable tools for handling the biblical text. Within that landscape, the niche that my volumes are designed to fill is the literary approach to the Bible. This has been my scholarly passion for nearly half a century. It is my belief that a literary approach to the Bible is the common reader’s friend, in contrast to more specialized types of scholarship on the Bible.

Nonetheless, the literary approach to the Bible needs to be defended against legitimate fears by evangelical Christians, and through the years I have not scorned to clear the territory of misconceptions as part of my defense of a literary analysis of the Bible. In kernel form, my message has been this:

1.To view the Bible as literature is not a suspect modern idea, nor does it need to imply theological liberalism. The idea of the Bible as literature began with the writers of the Bible, who display literary qualities in their writings and who refer with technical precision to a wide range of literary genres such as psalm, proverb, parable, apocalypse, and many more.

2.Although fiction is a common trait of literature, it is not an essential feature of it. A work of literature can be replete with literary technique and artifice while remaining historically factual.

3.To approach the Bible as literature need not be characterized by viewing the Bible only as literature, any more than reading it as history requires us to see only the history of the Bible.

4.When we see literary qualities in the Bible we are not attempting to bring the Bible down to the level of ordinary literature; it is simply an objective statement about the inherent nature of the Bible. The Bible can be trusted to reveal its extraordinary qualities if we approach it with ordinary methods of literary analysis.

To sum up, it would be tragic if we allowed ourselves to be deprived of literary methods of analyzing the Bible by claims that are fallacies.

What, then, does it mean to approach the Bible as literature? A literary study of the Bible should begin where any other approach begins—by accepting as true all that the biblical writers claim about their book. These claims include its inspiration and superintendence by God, its infallibility, its historical truthfulness, its unique power to infiltrate people’s lives, and its supreme authority.

With that as a foundation, a literary approach to the Bible is characterized by the following traits:

1.An acknowledgement that the Bible comes to us in a predominantly literary format. In the words of C. S. Lewis, “There is a … sense in which the Bible, since it is after all literature, cannot properly be read except as literature; and the different parts of it as the different sorts of literature they are.”1 The overall format of the Bible is that of an anthology of literature.

2.In keeping with that, a literary approach identifies the genres and other literary forms of the Bible and analyzes individual texts in keeping with those forms. An awareness of literary genres and forms programs how we analyze a biblical text and opens doors into a text that would otherwise remain closed.

3.A literary approach begins with the premise that a work of literature embodies universal human experience. Such truthfulness to human experience is complementary to the tendency of traditional approaches to the Bible to mainly see ideas in it. A literary approach corrects a commonly held fallacy that the Bible is a theology book with proof texts attached.

4.A literary approach to the Bible is ready to grant value to the biblical authors’ skill with language and literary technique, seeing these as an added avenue to our enjoyment of the Bible.

5.A literary approach to the Bible takes its humble place alongside the two other main approaches—the theological and the historical. These three domains are established by the biblical writers themselves, who usually combine all three elements in their writings. However, in terms of space, the Bible is a predominantly literary book. Usually the historical and theological material is packaged in literary form.

These traits and methods of literary analysis govern the content of my series of guided studies to the genres of the Bible.

Although individual books in my series are organized by the leading literary genres that appear in the Bible, I need to highlight that all of these genres have certain traits in common. Literature itself, en masse, makes up a homogenous whole. In fact, we can speak of literature as a genre (the title of the opening chapter of a book titled Kinds of Literature). The traits that make up literature as a genre will simply be assumed in the volumes in this series. They include the following: universal, recognizable human experience concretely embodied as the subject matter; the packaging of this subject matter in distinctly literary genres; the authors’ use of special resources of language that set their writing apart from everyday expository discourse; stylistic excellence and other forms of artistry that are part of the beauty of a work of literature.

What are the advantages that come from applying the methods of literary analysis? In brief, they are as follows: an improved method of interacting with biblical texts in terms of the type of writing that they are; doing justice to the specificity of texts (again because the approach is tailored to the genres of a text); ability to see unifying patterns in a text; relating texts to everyday human experience; enjoyment of the artistic skill of biblical authors.

Summary

A book needs to be read in keeping with its author’s intention. We can see from the Bible itself that it is a thoroughly literary book. God superintended its authors to write a very (though not wholly) literary book. To pay adequate attention to the literary qualities of the Bible not only helps to unlock the meanings of the Bible; it is also a way of honoring the literary intentions of its authors. Surely biblical authors regarded everything that they put into their writing as important. We also need to regard those things as important.

Introduction

Getting the Most Out of Biblical Narrative

The appeal of stories is universal. In fact, one of the most common human impulses can be summed up in four words: “tell me a story.” During the course of a typical day, nearly everyone finds occasion to string together incidents and thereby tell a story. A typical meal with family or friends is an incipient storytelling session. We turn the day’s experiences into a story in order to cope with our difficulties and relish our triumphs.

The Bible continuously satisfies the universal human desire for narrative. This was highlighted when Henry R. Luce, founder of Time magazine, said in an interview, “Time didn’t start this emphasis on stories about people; the Bible did.” Although the Bible is comprised of dozens of literary genres, the dominant one is narrative. Even the non-narrative parts are placed within an overall story known as universal history and salvation history. A biblical scholar of a bygone era rendered the oft-quoted verdict that “the narrative mode is uniquely important in Christianity,” starting with the Bible.2

We can assign this dominance of narrative in the Bible to at least three causes. First, it is rooted in the character of God, who is the God who acts. Second, biblical writers are preoccupied with history, and they overwhelmingly want us to know what actually happened. To record what happened is to tell a story. Third, life itself has a narrative quality, being comprised of exactly the same ingredients that stories possess (setting, characters, plot, progression in time, and so forth). The narrative quality of the Bible is part of its truthfulness to life.

The history recorded in the Bible exists on a continuum of which literary narrative is only a part. On one end of the continuum we find the historical impulse to record the facts of what occurred, but nothing more. On the literary end of the continuum we find events, settings, and characters presented in full detail and with artistry, so that we relive the story in our imaginations and relish the storyteller’s skill. The historical material of the Bible covers the entire continuum. The more fully a historical account is presented, the more amenable it is to the methods of narrative analysis that I present in this book.

For this guided study I have of course chosen fully literary narrative. Within that category, the guided study format has required that I select brief narratives, not long ones like the books of Ruth and Esther or the stories of Abraham, Jacob, and Isaac in Genesis (though I have selected episodes from those longer narratives). I do not want this to conceal that the methods of analysis that I propound in this book are exactly the right ones to use with long biblical narratives as well as brief ones.

When compared to stories universally, the stories of the Bible are a combination of the familiar and the unique. We should note the following traits as being distinctive to the Bible. First, the preoccupation with history rather than fictional stories like Homer’s Odyssey or Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies sets biblical narrative apart. In keeping with the authors’ intention to stick with the facts, the storytellers of the Bible generally (but not without exception) write in a spare, unembellished style. Their preference is for the brief narrative unit (even though these brief units might be strung together to form a composite long story).

The presence of God as a character and supernatural events in most of the stories is another thing that makes them read differently from stories that we ordinarily read. As an extension of that, the pervasive religious quality of the Bible’s stories makes them different from stories generally. We can accurately say of the Bible that it is a divine story that is also a human story; we would only rarely say that of other stories. We can also profitably reverse the formula: the story of the Bible is a human story that is also a divine story. John Calvin was right when he said that true knowledge consists of two things—knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves (that is, people). The stories of the Bible give us those two things.

A summary statement may be allowed to Erich Auerbach, a literary scholar who wrote a famous essay comparing storytelling technique in Homer and the Bible (for which he chose the story of Abraham’s offering of Isaac). Regarding the biblical writers, Auerbach writes, “Their religious intent involves an absolute claim to historical truth.… The Bible’s claim to truth is not only far more urgent than Homer’s, it is tyrannical—it excludes all other claims.… The Scripture stories do not, like Homer’s, court our favor” but instead “seek to subject us.”3

However, along with these distinctive and sometimes unique features of biblical narrative, the stories of the Bible also share the common techniques of storytelling that have been used by all storytellers from time immemorial. All stories are comprised of setting, character, and plot. All storytellers use such narrative devices as dramatic irony and foreshadowing. All stories are built on the paradigm of plot conflict moving to resolution. Techniques of characterization are the same in the book of Genesis and the novels of Charles Dickens. A lot of harm has been done to people’s ability to interpret the stories of the Bible by the tendency of traditional approaches to seal the Bible off in a world of its own.

In this book I have not drawn connections between the stories of the Bible and the familiar stories of English and American literature, but I want my readers not to suppress the correspondences that they see between the stories of the Bible and stories universally. We will see more in the stories of the Bible, and we will handle them better, if we apply what we know about stories elsewhere to the stories of the Bible.

A final preliminary is to note that while stories are stories and not essays with logical development of ideas, there is a discourse level to any serious narrative. A good story does, indeed, entertain us, and it embodies human experience in such a way as to lead us to relive it along with the characters in the story. But a story is also intended by the author to convey a message. Further, this message can at some point be formulated as ideas. The literary term for such ideas is themes (generalizations about life).

At one level, a storyteller tells us about settings, characters, and events. But fiction writer Flannery O’Connor made the provocative statement that a storyteller speaks “with character and action, not about character and action.”4 If this is so, about what do storytellers speak by means of character and action? The answer: life, reality, truth.

Summary

Because we read the stories of Bible for edification, we tend overwhelmingly to place them into a category all by themselves. The first step toward a literary approach to the stories of the Bible is to apply all that we know about stories generally. A story needs to be read and analyzed as a story. The stories of the Bible are genuine stories, not something else. They can be trusted to reveal their unique religious qualities if we apply ordinary methods of narrative analysis to them. A literary approach will also reveal how skilled the storytellers of the Bible were at their craft.

1

The Subject of Every Story

The Embodiment of Universal Human Experience

A story has two components known as form and content. While the former is naturally the emphasis of narrative analysis, I have chosen to devote my first chapter to the often overlooked subject of content.

I immediately need to guard myself against possible misunderstanding by acknowledging that in the long run form and content cannot be separated, and that there is no content without the form in which it is embodied. Despite this, it is helpful sometimes to distinguish between form and content.

It is a truism that the subject of literature (whatever the genre) is universal human experience, concretely embodied. While this applies to all literature, it is particularly important for narrative. For one thing, stories more obviously than other genres embody human experience.

Second, unless we have a firm grasp on the experiential nature of stories, we will not see their relevance to life. In regard to the stories of the Bible, traditional approaches have tended to short circuit the fullness of the stories by quickly reducing them to a set of ideas. There is a whole further type of truth beyond the ideational, and it is this other type of truth that is the particular specialty of literature. We can accurately call it truthfulness to human experience and reality.

Drawing an analogy between a photograph and a work of literature will clarify this. A photograph puts a picture of life before us. It prompts us to stare at the photographer’s “slice of life.” As we stare at it, we come to see the selected sphere of life with heightened clarity. This is true of literature as well. The knowledge that literature imparts is knowledge in the form of right seeing.

How to See Universal Human Experience in Bible Stories

The best methodology for seeing recognizable human experience in the stories of the Bible is simply the conviction that the stories embody familiar human experience. If we are committed to the idea that the story of Jacob (for example) is filled with the experiences of everyday life, we will be able to see and name them.

But a few time-honored methods will help the process of seeing ourselves and our experiences in the stories of the Bible. One of them is the concept of building bridges between the ancient biblical story and our own world. “Bridging the gap” is the familiar term for this process. The gap between ourselves and the stories of the Bible requires us to take a two-way journey. First we need to travel from our own time and place to the world of the story. Paradoxically, the more thoroughly we immerse ourselves in the world of the ancient text, the more likely we are to see recognizable human experience in it.

After we have traveled to the world of the story and lived in it, we need to make a return trip. When we do so, we bridge the gap. The full range of familiar experience is the menu of possible links between the story and our own experience. What is particularly required is the ability to name the experiences of the biblical story in the terms with which we are familiar.

An additional piece of information will aid the process. We need to grasp the difference between literary discourse and expository discourse. Expository discourse is informational and explanatory. It is the language in which we conduct most of our everyday business. A textbook and a news story are examples of expository discourse.

By contrast, literary discourse aims to embody and “image forth” human experience. While expository discourse relies on generalizations, abstraction, and accumulation of facts, literary discourse uses a range of techniques to incarnate human experience as concretely as possible. With literature we do not assimilate facts and ideas but vicariously relive the experiences that the author places before us.

It may appear that we have strayed from the topic of finding recognizable human experience in the stories of the Bible, but we have not. The reason we can find an abundance of universal human experience in the stories of the Bible is that the storyteller has incarnated and embodied the content of the story in pictures, images, characters, and events. It is a truism that history books and the daily news tell us what happened, whereas literature tells us what happens. American poet Ezra Pound famously quipped that “literature is news that stays news.” The permanence of literature comes from an author’s concrete portrayal of human experience.

Familiar Human Experience in the Story of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9)

Contrary to what we might think, ancient or primitive literature like the book of Genesis and classical mythology has an uncanny ability to embody universal human experiences that, if viewed in a certain way, are as up to date as the daily newspaper:

1Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. 4Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” 5And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. 6And the LORD