Preface
Reading in a Special Way
 Reading the Bible as literature boils down to a certain
way of reading—reading in the context of the
categories and disciplines of literature—to better
understand or to cast light upon its words; it means
understanding the features that make the Bible
literature without denying its special role as religious
or sacred text.
Two Collections
 The Bible commonly has been understood as made up
of two sets of texts, the Hebraic and Christian: the
“Old Testament,” sometimes referred to as the Hebrew
Bible (this, more accurately referring to a collection
written in the original Hebrew language), and the
Christian “New Testament,” used here without any
suggestion that the Old Testament depends upon the
New for its meaning. Both texts may belong within
their own respective traditions.
Translation
 The translation used will be the New Revised
Standard Version, a translation, one that describes
itself as going back to the King James Version and as
retaining much of the original languages (Hebrew and
Greek) while making them accessible to modern
readers. This translation provides extensive study
notes, timelines, graphs, charts, maps, and outlines
that will aid readers in understanding the Bible in the
context of its own history, culture, and literature, and
will help readers avoid reading anachronistically.
Beyond Sacred Book
 Reading the Bible “as literature” redirects readers from issues concerning the sacred
nature and authority of the Bible to its existence as literature of a particular people:
the literature of the Hebrew nation (the Old Testament), and the literature of
Christianity (New Testament). With its complex history of composition, the writing
of the Old Testament alone taking over a thousand years, the Bible contains much
that is unique to itself but shares the mythological, metaphorical, and symbolic
language that belongs to literature across the centuries. Written in poetry and
prose, much of the Bible reads as a structured narrative abounding in stories,
characters, and plots worked out against a backdrop of an ancient people trying to
understand its nature, destiny, and place in the universe.
 Northrop Frye, Words with Power Being a Second Study of The Bible and Literature
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1990) xiii describes the central
structural principles of literature as deriving from myth, giving it “its
communicating power across the centuries” and a “continuity of form that points to
an identity of the literary organism.”
Basic Aim of Text
 The more basic and immediate aim of this text is to
introduce readers to some of the common tools of literary
analysis, to call attention to close reading in context, to
stress the role of interpretation, and finally, as an outcome
of reading and understanding, to appreciate the Bible.
Emphasizing unity, coherence, and whole-part
relationships, and the diversity among the texts
themselves, this text invites readers to look at the Bible
(and the books in the Bible), as it exists, as a whole. It pays
attention primarily to literary elements in the text but
presents other information important to building a context
for understanding the Bible and for encouraging further
study.
Organization
 Chapters for this text have been organized to demonstrate
how authors use language in particular ways to represent
and create meaning; how major genres begin with authors’
seeing, picturing, imitating, and creating literature that
illuminates actual life; how characters reveal identities; and
how themes help to create a sense of the Bible as a book.
These literary activities—using language in particular ways,
discovering meaning through language, and the acts of
seeing, classifying, identifying, and unifying—suggest an
active rather than passive interaction with the material and
point to the requirement of literature that readers engage
with the primary text.