The Bible as Literature

Core Idea

Reading the Bible as literature means studying its narratives, poems, parables and letters with the tools of literary analysis: structure, style, character, imagery and genre. The Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament contain many genres, including narrative, law, lyric and wisdom poetry, prophecy, gospel, parable, letter and apocalypse. Their stories and phrasing, especially through the King James Version of 1611, are among the most frequent sources of allusion in English and American literature, so this unit is a standard part of world-literature surveys and of preparation for AP Literature.

How It's Best Learned

Read Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac, slowly and list what the narrator tells you and what is left unsaid. Then read a Psalm and mark each pair of lines that restate or extend each other. Finish with a modern text that alludes to a biblical story, such as the Cain and Abel pattern in John Steinbeck's *East of Eden*, and explain how the allusion changes your reading.

Common Misconceptions

• Studying the Bible as literature requires accepting or rejecting its religious claims. (Literary study examines how the texts are written and how they have been used, which readers of any belief can do. It does not settle questions of faith.)
• The Bible is one book written in a single style. (It is a collection of many books, written over centuries in Hebrew, some Aramaic and Greek, with very different genres and styles.)
• Biblical poetry rhymes in the original. (Its main structural device is parallelism, in which a second line repeats, varies, contrasts or completes the first, as in "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.")

Explainer

Many writers in English, from Milton to Toni Morrison, could expect their readers to know the stories of Eden, Noah, Joseph, David, Job and the parables of Jesus. Those readers caught the echoes. Today a reader without that background can miss a great deal, which is one practical reason literature courses teach the Bible as a literary text.

The Bible is a library rather than a single book. The Hebrew Bible, which Christians call the Old Testament, includes the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings. The New Testament adds the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, letters and the book of Revelation. These texts were written over many centuries, mostly in Hebrew and Greek with some Aramaic, and they contain many genres: origin stories, family sagas, law codes, love poetry in the Song of Songs, wisdom literature in Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes, prophecy, parable and apocalyptic vision.

Biblical narrative has a recognizable style. In *Mimesis* (1946), Erich Auerbach compared Homer with the story in Genesis 22, where God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Homer describes everything in a bright foreground. Genesis tells almost nothing of Abraham's thoughts during the three days of travel. That silence makes readers ask what he felt, and the story is, in Auerbach's phrase, "fraught with background." Robert Alter's *The Art of Biblical Narrative* (1981) showed further techniques, such as repeated type-scenes like the meeting of a future bride at a well.

Biblical poetry works by parallelism. A line makes a statement, and the next restates, extends or reverses it: "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork." Because parallelism depends on meaning rather than sound, it survives translation.

For English, the most influential translation is the King James Version of 1611, produced by committees of scholars who drew heavily on William Tyndale's earlier work. Its wide use over centuries helped make phrases such as "the salt of the earth" and "a law unto themselves" part of everyday English. When you read a work that alludes to the Bible, identify the source story, compare the situations, and ask whether the new text repeats, inverts or questions it.