Untitled Sermon (2)
Is the Bible a History Book?
What then is the Bible?
THE BIBLE’S MACRO-GENRE AND THE ISSUE OF TRUTH
the Bible’s essential nature, what we might call its macro-genre
But my confidence in you does not guarantee that I will have an easy time comprehending what you have written
Since the Bible comprises a collection of works of diverse literary genres, the truth claim(s) of this or that biblical text (what this or that text intends to convey, command, etc.) can be discovered only as each text is read on its own terms, with due recognition of its genre and due attention to its content and wider and narrower contexts.
THE BIBLE AS A FOREIGN BOOK
recognition
“a naive application of modern western logic and judgement to the interpretation of ancient Near Eastern sources, including biblical literature, has [often] led us into error.”15
unless they are willing, by an effort of imagination, to enter a cultural and literary world different in many respects from their own—even a high view of the Bible’s veracity is no guarantee of a right view of its interpretation.
What is called for then, if mistakes are to be avoided, is the attainment of what has been called an ancient literary competence
Sternberg emphasizes that if the task of becoming competent in the original languages of the Bible is as indispensable as it is demanding, then so too is the task of becoming competent in the literary conventions of the Bible and its neighboring cultures. “As with linguistic code, so with artistic code.”22
“all literary study must assume that even quite remote cultures have some affinities with our own
In addition to drawing some reassurance from the significant degree of commonality between the literary forms of the biblical world and those of our own day, students of the Bible may be encouraged by what traditional Protestant thought has called the “perspicuity” (or clarity) of Scripture.27 In a carefully nuanced discussion of the clarity or obscurity of the Bible, Moisés Silva notes that the doctrine of perspicuity, while not exempt from challenge or misunderstanding, is nevertheless a necessary corrective to the dispiriting misconception that the Bible is a book inaccessible to all but an elite few
In view of the degree of commonality between the literatures of various ages and cultures and in view of the Bible’s clarity (perspicuity), every Bible reader (while recognizing that saving knowledge, like faith, is a gift of God) should be encouraged and challenged to know that with a good will and by the use of “ordinary means” a sufficient, if not comprehensive, understanding of biblical truth is attainable
“leaning on the expertise of scholars who have specialized interest should be regarded as one more instance of using ‘ordinary means’ in the study of Scripture
but to approach the contributions of scholars critically, testing them in the light of logic and common sense, and, preeminently, in the light of Scripture
GENRE CRITICISM AND BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION
Barton’s description of genre as “any recognizable and distinguishable type of writing or speech
Collins’s definition: “By ‘literary genre’ we mean a group of written texts marked by distinctive recurring characteristics which constitute a recognizable and coherent type of writing.”34
First, the question of genre can legitimately be addressed to a particular writing on various levels of discourse
we can describe the book of Psalms at one level as a poetical book, at another level as a hymn book or a prayer book, and at another level still as a collection containing lament psalms, songs of thanksgiving, hymns, royal psalms, wisdom psalms, and the like
One way scholars have sought to minimize the confusion is by limiting the use of the term genre to a particular level of discourse. Longman, for example, prefers to use “genre … to refer to a work as a whole and form to refer to a unit within a whole text.”38 Similarly, Osborne, following J. A. Baird, distinguishes “genre, form and mode.”
Baird says that “form” is a literary device, based on the nature of the material, which is used to analyze small units of literature; “genre” takes several of these units and collects them into a single whole for the purpose of classification; and “mode” is even more diffuse, noting characteristics which (sometimes artificially) unite various forms or genres under a single rubric.39
Sidney Greidanus takes a similar three-tiered approach. He labels the Bible as a whole “proclamation”—this would be its mode. Under this general rubric he lists the following canonical genres: narrative, prophecy, wisdom, psalm, gospel, epistle, apocalypse. Narrowing the focus yet further, he mentions various specific forms that may occur in one or another of the above genres: law, dream, lament, parable, miracle, exhortation, autobiography, funeral dirge, lawsuit, pronouncement, report, royal accession, and passion.40 Such terminological distinctions are useful but, unfortunately, have yet to become standardized
“To recognize what for a longer work of literature would be called its ‘genre’ is necessary for valid interpretation. Parables, for example, must not be interpreted like straightforward history; although they are very lifelike in many ways, Jesus may have included some details in them simply to make the stories lively and interesting.”44
For one thing, modern interpreters may not be as quick to recognize the signal as Jesus’ first-century audience would have been; this will depend on each interpreter’s level of ancient literary and cultural competence. For another, a single indicator is not usually sufficient to determine genre
In short, as I have written elsewhere, “an increased appreciation of the literary mechanisms of a text—how a story is told—often becomes the avenue of greater insight into the theological, religious and even historical significance of the text—what the story means.”52
First, we must recognize that genre criticism is primarily a descriptive and not a prescriptive enterprise
Still, just as it is useful for an outsider seeking to learn a foreign language to become acquainted with as much as possible of the grammar and syntax of that language, so it is very useful for the modern reader of the Bible to learn as much as possible of the Bible’s literary grammar and syntax
Second, we must resist the nineteenth-century notion that shorter, “purer” forms are early and “mixed” or “elaborated” forms are late
Third, while genre criticism is fundamentally based on commonality and comparisons, it is reductionistic to assume that unique texts cannot exist
One of the limitations of genre and form criticism is the fact that terms such as saga, legend, and even historiography—in fact, most of our genre labels—“have been drawn by and large from fields of literature outside the OT, indeed, from outside the period of time that produced the principal narratives.” Thus, as Coats reminds us, the labels apply to the biblical literature “only with a limited degree of accuracy.… Giving a name to the genre is necessary but only as a convenience for the discipline.”60 Genre labels may even prove to be a liability if they prevent us from seeing that the Bible, if it is indeed the word of God, can be expected to surpass (as a whole and, we may assume, in some of its parts) the human productions of its day.61
Fourth, since genre criticism by its very nature makes use of the comparative method, care must be taken that the comparative method does not become imperative
One of the drawbacks of form criticism and historical criticism as traditionally practiced is that these approaches have tended to focus primarily, if not exclusively, on the smaller units, with far too little attention being given to the larger.64
David Clines points out that instead of treating the books of the Bible as “literary works that generate meaning through their overall shape, their structure, and their dominant tendencies, that is, through their identity as wholes,” it has been customary for biblical scholarship to value them “piecemeal for their diverse contents.”65
The second of Bergen’s discourse principles is that “each successively higher level of textual organization influences all of the lower levels of which it is composed
Nowhere else in the ancient Near East is there to be found anything strictly comparable to this collecting and arranging of traditions and documents as successive elements in larger corpora and, ultimately, into a single corpus.68
The ancient Near East, then, offers little that can compare to the larger discourse units of the Old Testament—to say nothing of the whole Old Testament, or the whole Bible! This fact, however, does not justify a piecemeal approach to the biblical texts, as tempting as it may be to focus exclusively on smaller units where at least rough analogies in extrabiblical literature can be found
But is this reasoning sound? Is the fact that trees do not talk sufficient reason to label Jotham’s speech a fable? After all, according to the “laws of nature,” bushes do not burn without being consumed, and dead people do not rise from the grave.
In the case of Jotham’s speech, it is not the fabulous storyline but, rather, the larger context that makes it unmistakable that Jotham’s speech is a fable
The broader context apparently offers nothing that would mark it out as such; no interpretation, for example, is given. What one has, rather, is a story involving certain wondrous occurrences within the larger account of the book of Numbers, with no indication that a new formal literary type has been introduced. Thus, unless one is willing to argue that the book of Numbers as a whole must be characterized as fable, there appears to be no valid literary reason to label the Balaam stories as such.
GENRE CRITICISM AND THE RISE OF BIBLICAL POETICS
Form criticism may be described as a sort of lower-level genre criticism. It focuses on the smaller textual units that, in the case of biblical literature at least, are combined so as to form larger textual entities
one of the deficiencies of the form-critical approach is that it can tend to overlook the significance of the larger discourse unit
A convenient survey of higher-level genre criticism in New Testament studies is provided by Craig Blomberg.71 He divides his discussion under the headings Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Revelation
After summarizing recent debates over the genre of the Gospels, Blomberg ultimately concludes that they may be identified as “theological histories of selected events surrounding the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth” (p. 42)
Blomberg comes to similarly positive conclusions with respect to the book of Acts: “As with the gospels, the Acts may be compared with a known genre of Hellenistic literature while at the same time retaining features which made it sui generis. Theological history may be the best label for the combination” (p. 42).73
In Old Testament studies, some of the more useful attempts at higher-level genre criticism might be broadly grouped under the rubric of biblical poetics
While interpretation focuses on an individual text, poetics canvases many texts in an attempt “to find the building blocks of literature and the rules by which they are assembled
Of greater pertinence to our concern with biblical historiography is the work being done in the area of biblical narrative discourse. The appearance of Alter’s Art of Biblical Narrative in 1981 awakened new interest in the literary qualities of the Hebrew Bible, and a lively debate has followed. More substantial, and certainly no less controversial, is Sternberg’s Poetics of Biblical Narrative, which first appeared in 1985.79 These works and others like them have been less concerned with classifying the biblical texts than with exploring the specific workings of biblical narrative
Since poetics focuses on the internal workings of texts, it is an avowedly literary pursuit. This can and has seemed threatening to those more concerned with the historical and theological significance of the Bible. But as Sternberg has cogently argued, these three interests should not be set in opposition. He insists that “Biblical narrative emerges as a complex, because multifunctional, discourse. Functionally speaking, it is regulated by a set of three principles: ideological, historiographic, and aesthetic. How they cooperate is a tricky question.”81
an example of how consciousness of genre is basic to proper interpretation
these two chapters offer a nice example of the importance of interpreting biblical passages in the light of the genres in which they are cast
Ancient scribes could write different accounts about the same referents. But differences in purpose could determine differences in detail …, and in the selectivity of the events narrated … If the scribes’ purpose was to praise the king and/or the gods, poetry naturally offered a medium to heighten the emotions of the praise through rhetorical embellishment. Hence, divine activity and praise of the deities is encountered more often in the poetic versions.… But in most instances the poetic (or more rhetorical) text also added significant historical details so that the complementary nature of the accounts is manifest. (p. 127)