Literary Study of the Bible: And the Word Became Text

What is “literary study of the Bible”? More to the point, what is “literary study”? First and foremost, it means attention to form and imagination; that is, a focus on the shapes that we give to our written songs and annals, our arguments and tales – and on the images that animate them. Thus “literary study” means observing the types and traditions of writing; noting the changes that writers and their word‐pictures ring on these traditions; listening to the figures and sounds of language; and scrutinizing the effects of these variations on hearers and readers. Add to these elements the storytelling devices of characterization and plot, the atmospheric considerations of tone and mood, and the perennial questions of subject matter and theme, and one has a reasonable sense of what literary study entails. It explores the mysterious space between imaginative adoption and adaptation, and thus it is not an exact science.

Speaking of science, the oldest recorded use of the word “literary” occurs in 1605, in Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning, the first programmatic description and defense of what he called “natural philosophy” and what we now call “the scientific method.” This means that the terminology of the specifically “literary” is twin‐born with the great empirical project that distinguishes between the imaginary and the factual, the humane and the technical, the fantastic and the real. Yet in 1605, Bacon sees the literary and empirical not as conflicting but as complementary, as two deeply important kinds of scientia, or “science” – that is, of knowledge. Indeed, for the father of empiricism, the “literary,” far from being an illusion destined to be dispelled by the long march of science, is instead the summation and goal of science itself, virtually synonymous with all “knowing”: for, he says, the “literary” is that “which doth most show the spirit, and life of the person.” As much as empirical experiment may expose and describe the splendid machinery of life, says Bacon, the point of this machinery is to support human personality. So if we are to know persons, to know spirits – to know souls – we must look to the literary. Without it, Bacon writes, natural and civil history are effectively blind, like “Polyphemus with his eye out” – and a Cyclops has no eye to spare.¹ To leap from Homer to Jesus, “If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matthew 6:23).

Having invoked the New Testament, what then do we say about “literary study of the Bible”? If we moderns (and now post‐moderns) often hear the comparison of the literary and the scientific as an opposition between fancy and fact, we also sometimes hear “the Bible as literature” as either a rejection or as a stratagem – that is, either as a pretext for dismissing or ignoring the Bible's pervasive truth claims and religious content, or as an excuse for proselytizing on their behalf. In other words, in the ears of many, “the Bible as literature” registers as “the Bible as mere literature,” with “literature” meaning fantasy or legend rather than reality; or, on the other hand, as “the Bible treated as great literature for stealth evangelism.”

What both of these rather jaded responses have in common is their despair of any way in which people with truly diverse beliefs and backgrounds can approach an open, respectful, responsible study of the Judeo‐Christian scriptures – either the secularists fear that the evangelists will try to hijack the discussion, or the religious folk worry that the Word of God will be disrespected and dissected as just another “text.” It's not difficult to understand either reaction, for the Bible is both uniquely beloved and highly alarming. No other ancient book is so continuously contemporary in the modern world as the Bible, a runaway best‐seller for centuries; no other old book is so intimately familiar, or so excessively strange, often to the same readers; and readers bring to this book, more than to any other set of literary writings, their strong preconceptions about what the text says and how to understand it. Furthermore, even in our supposedly secular age, presidents and jurors are not sworn in on Moby‐Dick, and people generally have not been willing to die (or to live) for Pride and Prejudice. Thus, for many the Bible is a culturally threatening and frightening book, too often used as a weapon; while for many the Bible contains the authoritative Word of God, the fountain of joy, the waters of Life itself for many others, perhaps most, the Bible is a little of both. Thus, few who open a Bible are indifferent to it.

So what, after all, does it mean when the Word becomes “text”? That is, what happens when the professed words of God Almighty come down and dwell among us where they can be put to the question, like words in a play or poem or story? The answer is that, with the right combination of contextual knowledge, ideological humility, and interpretive care, much richer understanding can emerge. While it is worthwhile to approach the Bible with many other devotional and academic methods, our approach in this textbook will be to ask consciously “literary” questions about form, language, characterization, poetic craft, and imaginative tradition – and to contextualize these questions with what can be solidly known (rather than speculatively guessed) about the texts' composition and history. Some devout Bible readers may be concerned that such a focus on human means may obscure the divine ends of these sacred writings; more secular readers may be unsettled that we will find a good deal more textual integrity and complementarity in and among the Bible's books than do many current theorists. Some believers will be disturbed that I don't endorse any one doctrinal system for interpretation, while some skeptics will worry that I decline to refute or criticize the obvious supernaturalism of nearly all the biblical writers.

My response to all such concerns is that the first responsibility of literary interpretation is to interrogate the text as we have it, and to give the original writers and audiences the basic human courtesy of consulting their points of view before imposing our own. No doubt there will be time to correct, to doubt, or to disagree, just as there will be time to endorse, to affirm, or to embrace. But first we need to know, fully and fairly, just what we are choosing to dismiss or to believe. As for the concern that we murder the text to dissect it: anatomy is not merely or necessarily the dismembering of the dead. Indeed, the best and most revealing kind of anatomical study “re‐members” the interrelations of vital organs in sustaining the growth and movement of an animate organism – very much alive on the hoof or on foot or on the wing. Similarly, to note that a psalm is made of words and rhythms and parallels and figures and stanzas isn't to leave it flayed like a disarticulated bird, but to re‐experience wonder every time the living poem takes flight anew in the reader's eye and ear.

How, then, can literary study of the Bible advance our learning? First, of course, as one of the world's foundational cultural texts, the Bible is an imaginative source book for countless references to come, from Fiat Lux and Noah's dove, through “let my people go” and Goliath's head, to the Moneychangers and the Prodigal Son and the City Foursquare. We will trace the Bible's literary influences on confessional writing and Dante's cosmology, Arthurian chronicle and King Lear, metaphysical poetry and Goethe's Faust. We will draw lines connecting Genesis and Jefferson, Moses and Martin Luther King, Gideon and Churchill, Samson and Shane, Job and George Bailey, David and Dylan. We'll attend to Founding Mothers, Warrior Women, Domestic Heroines, Seductresses, and Redeemed Courtesans from Eve, Sarah, Rahab, and Deborah, to Ruth, Jezebel, the Magdelene, and Mary – not forgetting the Whore of Babylon and the Bride of Christ.

Second, we'll consider the Bible's many books as embedded in a network of pan‐Mediterranean and Afro‐Eurasian cultures stretching back 7000 years, finding echoes of the Enuma Elish and Gilgamesh in Genesis, drawing comparisons between Hammurabi and Exodus and Akhenaten, hearing anticipations of the Psalms and Canticles in Egyptian love lyrics, and foreshadowings of Homer in the Davidic epic of 1 and 2 Samuel; and we'll discover the roots of Gospel narrative in Hebrew chronicle, of New Testament theological letters in workaday Greco‐Latin epistles, and of Revelation's famed symbology in Old Testament apocalyptic prophecy.

But third, we'll advance our learning by not only attending to Bible legacies and sources, but also to the Bible's unparalleled range of characterization, setting, style, and theme. Far from being a monotonous monotheistic monologue, this great book of divinity is a humanistic education in itself, presenting a dizzying diversity of voices, outlooks, and circumstances far surpassing Shakespeare and Dickens. This range begins in the opening chapters of Genesis, with its doubled creation accounts, and appears in the line‐by‐line variety of Hebrew parallel poetry, and in the famed reticence of biblical narrative style, which portrays different motives and outcomes with shockingly little judgment – so that, as Mark Twain puts it, the story “seems to tell itself.” No ancient book, or anthology of books, invites us to consider such varied ethical and personal perspectives, and yet no book is better known for its ultimate moral and cosmic certainty. If by “literary” we mean, with Bacon, that “which doth most show the spirit, and life of the person,” then the Bible is “literature” par excellence.

Perhaps this is partly why that founding empiricist held an opinion of biblical authority probably shocking to our contemporary ears. Like the next generations of experimental researchers to come after him, from William Harvey through the Royal Society's founders and Isaac Newton, Bacon saw the Bible both as the foundation and the ultimate goal of this accumulation of “literary,” humane learning. Trusting in the design and ordained laws of the Creator, Bacon and his disciples sought to think God's thoughts after him, confident that discovery was also a kind of “recovery” of forgotten truth, a rolling back of sin's curse and an advancement of human flourishing that would, paradoxically, take humanity back to the future in a kind of Paradise regained.

It is now, of course, common to hear the Bible spoken of as superseded and even replaced by the research machinery that Bacon wrought. Humanity still seeks some kind of Paradise, but we are told that it will be regained, or gained, by cumulative human means; indeed, in this view, true Paradise can only come when humans fully rely on their own rigorously tested insight, end a childish dependence on the gods, and stand forth to “know good and evil” on their own, and thus merit the optimistic self‐imposed title “Homo sapiens,” “wise men.” Yet that very language should bring us up with a start, for the Bible writers anticipated it thousands of years ago, whether in Genesis (“you shall be as gods”) or in Ecclesiastes (“adding one thing to another to find out the reason”) or in Romans (“professing to be wise”). Somehow, even when we would escape biblical ideas, we find ourselves repeating them, even if many follow these themes to different conclusions.

Perhaps ironically, while many reject the relevance of biblical “divinity” on scientific grounds, others question the worth of the “humanities,” as well. Certain ardent advocates of the empirical project see their work not as complementary to the literary, but rather as essentially competitive with it, increasingly dismissing “the humanities” as at best a passing amusement, and at worst a wasteful distraction – useful not as ends in themselves, but only to be admitted on utilitarian terms, as promoters and handmaids of technological and material progress. Newspaper opinion pages and online response sites regularly teem with debates over the relative value to society of projects empirical and humanistic, some arguing that just as God (or the concept of God) “died” in the 1960s, so “humanity” (or the concept of humanity) is dying now, in order to make room for some new human–technological hybridity that will own the future. Ironically, a devaluation of “humanistic” learning, once primarily the theme of religious fundamentalists, has now become a goal of some atheist materialists.

While the full range of these philosophical and theological arguments is beyond the scope of this literary textbook, I would say two things in drawing this preface to a close: first, that, whatever we believe about the Bible's claims for itself, biblical images and categories of thought are more relevant than ever, as we all seem to be drawn irresistibly to language of “knowing the end from the beginning,” of seeking a new “Genesis” of “redemption” and even “salvation” by remaking the world “in our image” in order to prevent the “Apocalypse” and somehow return to the “Garden.” But second, we will remember Bacon's warning: if the “empirical” is one eye and the “literary” the other, we should beware lest in putting out the “unnecessary” eye we make ourselves as blind as Polyphemus. For really, there are no unnecessary eyes, if we are to see deep and whole.

Such a multiplicity of perspective informs this textbook's very structure. First, the reader will find a kind of “peripheral vision” represented by a series of boxes that periodically illuminate particular linguistic, historical, geographical, or cultural details in order to enrich the main flow of discussion without disrupting it. Second, each chapter ends with “hindsight,” raising a series of questions for further exploration and discussion, reflecting back on the main terms and points made in that chapter, and pressing the reader to consider larger implications and consequences.

And third, our literary approach means that our chapter sequence will follow central concepts and a variety of genres more than strict biblical book order. Thus, while Chapter 1 begins with Genesis, it quickly moves into a more general discussion of ancient reading practices, then itemizes inherited literary types as they appear throughout the Bible. This wide‐ranging overview segues into Chapter 2 on other preliminary questions of composition and canonicity, touching on varied hypotheses about the Bible's documentary origins. Full‐on discussion of specific Old Testament books doesn't begin until Chapter 3, on the most quintessential of Hebrew genres, the lyric poetry of the Psalms and Canticles, followed by Chapter 4 on the wisdom writing of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Having started in the middle of the Bible, it is only in Chapter 5 that we return to the beginning, taking up Genesis in depth by dealing with the elements of biblical narrative style, and with its highly condensed and multi‐faceted creation accounts, followed in Chapter 6 by discussion of patriarchy and its discontents in the rest of Genesis, and by the book's unfolding succession of divine–human contracts or “covenants.”

Chapter 7 takes up epic heroism as developed and modified in the life of Moses throughout the remainder of the Pentateuch, with Chapter 8 considering how the heroic ideal is further remade in the shorter hero stories of Joshua, Judges, and Ruth. Chapter 9 returns to the epic genre with the sweeping sagas of Kings Saul and David in 1 and 2 Samuel, then Chapter 10 turns to the more episodic (and often tragic) national narratives found in the books of Kings, Chronicles, Ezra‐Nehemiah, and Esther. Chapter 11 pauses from prose narrative to consider the poetic and tragicomic drama in the ancient Book of Job, while Chapter 12 asks “who speaks for God?” and surveys the wide range of prophetic callings, modes, and literary forms evident in the “Former Prophets” Elijah and Elisha, and in all of the “Latter Prophets,” including the “Major Prophets” Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, and the “Minor Prophets” from Hosea to Malachi.

Moving from the Old Testament to the briefer books and letters of the New, Chapter 13 examines the political, cultural, and religious developments of the “Intertestamental” period, applying these contexts to the conventions of remade heroic prose narrative in the four canonical Gospels and the Book of Acts; Chapter 14 contextualizes the New Testament epistles, sampling and analyzing a representative variety of divine–human correspondence from the letters of Paul, James, Peter, John, and Jude; and Chapter 15 casts an eye on the dazzling difficulties of Revelation, measuring the fearful symmetry that structures its mighty vision; we scan the bewildering assortment of interpretive schools, but finally circle back, like the Apocalypse itself, to a tree by a river in a garden, where Genesis began.

With this end that is also a beginning, the Bible seems built to remind us that, in a world of partial sight and fragmentary experience, once is not enough. When the Word becomes text, truth takes “more shapes than one,” as Milton wrote, and it takes diverse vision – a kind of literary and textual empiricism – to “re‐member” these shapes and to see truth plain. So as our first chapter will show, “Reading Like a Hebrew” means learning to look from multiple angles. As old Solomon said, “two are better than one.”

Unless otherwise indicated, all biblical quotations are from the New King James Version.

Since this book is the fruit of a quarter‐century of teaching, many of my most prominent debts are to colleagues and students. James E. Evans, my first Head in the English Department of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, invited me in 1994 to develop a course in Literary Study of the Bible, and after my initial trepidation passed, I discovered that English 371 stirred the liveliest and widest‐ranging discussions of all my classes – which is saying a great deal, since my other courses engage the most splendid works of the Renaissance, from Thomas More and Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare through the metaphysical poets and John Milton and Andrew Marvell. Indeed, while I have benefited from a number of other texts and textbooks treating “The Bible as Literature” (see Suggestions for Further Reading), my roots in the English Renaissance inspired my book's unique design, for I begin all of my courses with a unit on lyric poetry – whether Shakespeare's Sonnets, John Donne's Songs and Sonnets and Divine Poems, George Herbert's Temple, or Milton's Poems. So I elect to begin this book in the middle of the Bible, and of biblical literary history, with the Psalms. Each psalm is a “little world made cunningly,” and all of them nevertheless model many of the chief devices, characteristics, and themes of Hebrew literature. I have found that starting in medias res like the epic poets of old, by unpacking a few representative short lyric poems, is the quickest and most exciting way into the heart of the biblical imagination, and hope that the reader will too.

I also wish I could thank my late colleague Russ McDonald, “Shakespeare god” and unparalleled academic yenta, for first suggesting my course's potential as a textbook, and for putting me in touch with Wiley‐Blackwell Acquisitions Editor Emma Bennett, who over the course of the book's long gestation was joined or succeeded by Isobel Bainton, Ben Thatcher, Annie Rose, Sarah Wightman, Deirdre Ilkson, Manish Luthra, Jake Opie, Viniprammia Premkumar, and Camille Bramall. As to that gestation, many other projects have delayed the progress of this book – two monographs, four essay collections, one journal special issue, two National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants leading to two born‐digital editions, and about a dozen conferences and symposia organized and presented – making my task feel at times, as Marvell said, “vaster than empires, and more slow.” I console myself that Moses took fifteen more years than I to arrive in the Promised Land.

But this gradual ripening has meant that virtually every concept, lesson, or example in the finished book has been tested and refined dozens of times in collaboration with the thousands of students who have explored the Bible with me over the decades. These students have come from virtually every religious persuasion, including “none”; from every continent except Antarctica; from scores of academic disciplines across the natural and social sciences, arts and humanities; and they have ranged from Sunday School and Hebrew School stars to biblical neophytes, and from the most enthusiastic literati to inveterate poetophobes. This very long “road test” means that while there are some great questions that this textbook does not presume to answer – usually questions of a metaphysical variety – there are very few questions and challenges that this author has not heard or addressed. Thus, my debt of gratitude to my students is practically infinite – hardly a page of this book would exist without them.

Special thanks are also due to some special mentors, colleagues, students, correspondents, and friends who have influenced or discussed or read this work in progress and thus have helped me to improve it (in alphabetical order): Brian Augustine, Beatrice Batson, Anthony Brogan, Neal Buck, Jason Crawford, Anthony Cuda, Sam Fornecker, Kathleen Fowler, John Gabel, Sidney Gottlieb, Malcolm Guite, Hannibal Hamlin, Andrew Harvey, Russell Hillier, Alice Irby, Bill Kellogg, Nathan Kline, Gail McDonald, Charles McKnight, Jeff Miller, Matt Mullins, Kenneth Oliver, Harrison Phipps, Stephen Prickett, Leland Ryken, Joseph Sterrett, Richard Strier, Louis Surprenant, Matt Wallace, Robert Whalen, Joan Whitcomb, and Helen Wilcox.

Many in my family have lived with and responded to this undertaking: my children, Mary, Alice, and George, for much of their lives; my father Royce and late mother Eleanor, in their repeated visits to my classrooms; my brothers Craig and Charles; and my wife Hope – my best friend and best editor. Consummatum est!