In this article, now archived at this address, the author announces a new series in his treatment of the Sacred Scriptures. Beginning with a brief explanation of Dei Verbum, no. 12, he then proceeds to explain the literary component of the Sacred Scriptures.
This article begins a new series on the topic of "The Bible As Literature." To introduce the topic, a short commentary on Dei Verbum 12 will be made. This will be followed by an explanation of the characteristics of biblical prose and poetry and finally, examples of each as found in the books of the scriptures will be treated.
This series will have the following general outline:
- The Word of God: Prose and Poetry (this article)
- Biblical Poetry: Some Characteristics
- Biblical Prose: Narrative and Discourse
- Sample Readings
To begin our discussion therefore, let me bring forth a conviction that immediately follows from the idea that the Scriptures were authored by God through the instrumentality of men. The document Dei Verbum, 12 expresses this conviction thus:
"12. (S)ince God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men in human fashion, the interpreter of Sacred Scripture, in order to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us, should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words. To search out the intention of the sacred writers, attention should be given, among other things, to "literary forms." For truth is set forth and expressed differently in texts which are variously historical, prophetic, poetic, or of other forms of discourse. The interpreter must investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended to express and actually expressed in particular circumstances by using contemporary literary forms in accordance with the situation of his own time and culture. For the correct understanding of what the sacred author wanted to assert, due attention must be paid to the customary and characteristic styles of feeling, speaking and narrating which prevailed at the time of the sacred writer, and to the patterns men normally employed at that period in their everyday dealings with one another. " [ Dei Verbum, 12]
Let us take "the interpreter of Sacred Scripture" to loosely mean "he/she who wishes to read the Bible intelligently." "Reading the Bible intelligently" is that activity by which the person of faith approaches the Scriptures with all of his/her God given talents in an integral and total act of religion to the God Revealing Himself in the humility of human words. This we have explained at length in previous articles. The phrase "intention of the sacred writer" must be understood strictly to refer to what was literarily meant by the human authors whom God has chosen to consign into writing everything and only those things which He wanted (cf. Dei Verbum 11). (I have purposely used the adverb "literarily" to emphasize the literary production of the sacred writers, and I intentionally use it against those who overly insist -- and most often without reason -- that the Scriptures should be understood literaly[1].) Given these distinctions, the rest of the passage should not be difficult to understand. The following points focus on the literary nature of God's revelation in the sacred text:
- What the sacred writers meant is discernible through the literary forms he employed[2]. (T)ruth -- Revealed Truth -- is "set forth and expressed differently in texts which are variously historical, prophetic, poetic, or of other forms of discourse." Grammar and syntax is not enough then; one must also have a literary sensibility.
- The literary forms employed -- and this is confirmed by contemporary biblical scholarship -- were sometimes borrowed from the surrounding cultures. Hence, it is important that the intelligent reader of Scriptures be aware of HOW these were used. It is not enough to know, for instance, that the myth of the Flood is present in Sumerian mythologies as well as in the Bible; one must also see how the story is used to illustrate the deeply nourished conviction that God is merciful, that He does not delight in the death of anyone, and that the hope of the present lies in those who have emerged from the cleansing of the waters[3].
- The literary forms employed by the sacred writer must also be understood against the background of the history and culture that produced them. The "spirit" of the text derives from the "spirit" of the times and of the men and women that produced it. Hence, attention must also be paid to the customary and characteristic styles of feeling, speaking and narrating which prevailed at the time of the sacred writer, and to the patterns men normally employed at that period in their everyday dealings with one another. The poetry of the psalms is not like the poetry of Joyce, and therefore, even the experienced reader should be ready to rethink his/her idea of poetry when trying to understand one of David's psalms.
The intelligent reader of Scriptures must be at least aware of the literary nature of the Inspired Scriptures. Our modern translations try to create this sensibility in the way they present biblical texts. Pick up a Jerusalem Bible, an NAB, or even the NIV, and one sees that certain texts are presented one way, while others are presented in another way. Let the reader compare the way his/her translation presents the Psalms on the one hand, and the book of Chronicles on the other. If he/she is using a good translation, those books will be presented in two different ways. Or one can also compare Leviticus and Proverbs, for that matter. All that our modern translations are doing is to make the reader aware that there are certain parts in our Bibles that are to be read differently from others.
Reading the Bible is in a sense similar to reading a newspaper. When we pick up the newspaper, we find news reports, obituaries, classified ads, cartoons, movie reviews, political essays, economic forecasts, stock reports... One reads a stock report differently from an obituary; one would read a cartoon differently from a horoscope. When we open up the Bible, we find genealogies, sagas, psalms and canticles, chronicler's reports, miracle stories, prophecies, apocalypses, letters, homilies,... One would not read a genealogy in the same way as one would read the Ten Commandments, for example, or a psalm in the same way as a letter. This observation just reinforces what we already find expressed in Dei Verbum: that the Truth is accomodated to the literary form that expresses it.
Given these considerations therefore, we move on to an assertion of a fact: if we are going to gather all the literary forms found in the Bible, we will come up with two general collections: biblical prose and biblical poetry. The general reader understands what these means. A romance novel is prose; so is a spy story. This article is prose, so is your newspaper's editorial. A haiku is a kind of poem. Poe's "The Raven" is a poem. These last two fall under "poetry." But what is biblical prose? What is biblical poetry? There is the catch. I don't know. What Augustine said about time can also be said here: If no one asks me about biblical prose and poetry, I know what they are; If someone does ask me about them, I don't know. The truth is, to answer those questions, one must have begun to theorize about the way prose and poetry are found in the Scriptures. And when one realizes that what is called biblical prose and poetry are to be found in the middle of a gradient whose ends are what some -- in the twenty-first century -- would consider as pure prose on the one hand and pure poetry on the other (if they exist), then all we can do is point out the characteristics of each and illustrate them with examples taken from Scriptures itself. This last will be our task in the articles yet to come.
[1] A literal understanding of the Scriptures cannot go beyond the morphology, grammar and syntax of Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. If this were all that is needed, then all of us should be reading lexicons for Biblical Hebrew and Greek.
[2] I purposely use the masculine pronoun here because scribes were usually male, and I am not sure whether there were at any given point in the history of the transmission of biblical texts women writers.
[3] This I think is the import of the Flood story to those who combined with other stories during the Exile: to give hope to the remnant that has survived the purifying waters that Isaiah announced in his time. It is a theme that can also be discerned in the way the Crossing of the Red Sea (cf. Exodus) has been combined with other stories during its final redaction (during the Exile too?). It is not surprising then that quite early in the history of Christianity, the Flood story became a symbol of the cleansing of the waters of baptism, with the wood of Noah's ark understood as the foreshadowing of the cross.
