The Bible as literature

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The Bible as literature is a course commonly taught in the humanities in universities and colleges. Because of the enormous role that the Bible, including its stories, characters, tropes, and language, have played in western civilization and culture, the idea is to study the Bible in the same way one might study Shakespeare or other classic literature, looking at areas including language, form, genre, and allusion. This sort of satisfies people who want to keep western culture at the apex of the pile (because the Bible was written in English, it's typically seen as a work of the western canon along with Shakespeare, Dickens, etc, in addition to being important for understanding Biblical references in Milton, Shakespeare, and many other writers); study of the Bible as literature has been done by some of the most respected and cited 20^th-century critics including Northrop Frye and Frank Kermode, as well as by people with links to both literature and theology such as CS Lewis. It slightly annoys some Christians who can see that people are still reading the Bible, but they're not reading it properly, although many Christians recognize it as valuable for attempts at understanding the Bible.

It is also sometimes known as Literary Study of the Bible. It contrasts with Biblical criticism, which focuses on topics such as establishing authoritative texts and identifying authorship, sources, dates, language, place of composition, etc.

History

The subject goes back to the mid-20^th century as an organised discipline. But before then, many people discussed the Bible's literary qualities including St Augustine of Hippo and Martin Luther. It should be uncontroversial that some parts of the Bible have literary merit, as the Bible is a work that combines many genres including poetry (Song of Solomon most notably), sophisticated myth (Book of Job), arguably tragedy (Samson), as well as the boring unliterary bits such as lists of rules (Book of Leviticus), lists of kings (Books of Kings), and lists of begettings (Book of Genesis). As early as 1888, William E Chancellor published an essay, "The Literary Study of the Bible: Its Methods and Purposes Illustrated in a Criticism of the Book of Amos".

Landmark figures include the critic Northrop Frye and Thomas Rice Henn. The literary critic Frye reportedly started teaching a course on the Bible because his literature students were unable to get the Biblical references in Milton's Paradise Lost and other texts. He wrote about the Bible in books such as The Great Code: the Bible and Literature (1981), and Words With Power: Being a Second Study of "The Bible and Literature" (1990). Frye came to the Bible from studies of literature and myth, influenced by figures including Giambattista Vico, James Frazer, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell. The Great Code considered the Bible as a single work of literature, not a medley of different texts, and Frye analysed it as having basically a comic or U-shaped form where things first go to shit, and then recover; he saw this U-shape as being reflected in many smaller-scale stories within the Bible. In Words With Power he focused on what he considered a distinctive feature of the Bible, what he called "kerygmatic" language, i.e. the words spoken by God, while considering issues such as human beings' creative potential and the power inherent in human society.

Henn, an expert on Shakespeare and WB Yeats, wrote The Bible as Literature, published in 1970. Another landmark text was The Literary Guide to the Bible published in 1987, edited by Frank Kermode (a very eminent English literary critic often mistaken for an Old Testament prophet) and Robert Alter (a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature). Covering most of the Protestant Bible, it includes essays on topics such as the relationship between the New Testament and Greco-Roman literature; ancient Hebrew poetry; and the construction of the canon.

Cranky and often contrarian literary critic Harold Bloom, notorious for his defence of the white male English literary canon, wrote a commentary on The Book of J (1990); Kermode claimed the Old Testament was largely written by a woman (perhaps a Hebrew princess) around 500 BCE; J is the conventional name for the author of those parts of the Old Testament that refers to God as "Jahweh" or "Yahweh", and whom Bloom claimed to identify. Bloom argued that the text originally had nothing to do with piety, and had more in common with Franz Kafka: it thus becomes a project of stripping away the religion to expose the literary merit.

While many students of the Bible as literature haven't been devout Christians, some Christian apologists have defended the necessity of considering the Bible at least partly as literature. CS Lewis wrote:

Those who talk of reading the Bible 'as literature' sometimes mean, I think, reading it without attending to the main thing it is about; like reading Burke with no interest in politics, or reading the Aeneid with no interest in Rome. That seems to me to be nonsense. But there is a saner sense in which the Bible, since it is after all literature, cannot properly be read except as literature; and the different parts of it as the different sorts of literature they are.

Lewis suggested that understanding the Bible as a literary work was essential to understanding its true Christian message.

Separate to studying the actual Bible, the rewriting of the Bible as literature has also had a long history, with figures such as John Milton (Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, etc), rewriting parts to give it their own slant. Such texts are often covered in other literature courses. Even recently there have been retellings of Bible stories.

Criticism

From evangelicals

See the main article on this topic: Evangelicalism

When taught in colleges, the Bible as literature is commonly seen as being if not atheistic at least theologically liberal. Some Christians have various problems with subjecting the Bible to literary analysis, as though it weakens the Bible's power or message. You may suspect that they're really worried about what people will find if they study the Bible too closely.

Some people view studying the Bible as literature as imputing some new characteristic (literariness) that's not actually in the Bible, which means that the Bible isn't of literary merit until literary critics get their hands on it (yet much structuralist and poststructuralist continental literary theory has sought to question the nature of the "literary", and to study texts regardless of whether they are "literature"). Also, to some critics, there is a suspicion that studying the Bible as literature is tantamount to saying it's fictional (some more-or-less factual things are studied as literature, including Caesar's Gallic Wars and many didactic poems). Likewise, people don't get that literary criticism doesn't necessarily mean saying something is bad (criticism as essentially negative), but means applying critical faculties in analysis, and hence they think it equals saying God was wrong.

Some fundamentalists believe that since the Bible is the word of God, it cannot be subject to the same judgments and analysis as secular texts. This ignores the fact that it is read and comprehended through similar methods as anything else, and putting aside fundamentalist beliefs about Biblical inerrancy, the mainstream Protestant view is that the Bible was created by God acting through people and it thus carries the character of the people whom God used. Another objection is that literary criticism of the Bible isn't focusing on the Bible as religious message but as literary document, and to some extent ignores the truth of the Bible: literary criticism is appropriate for some texts, as nobody would go through Gulliver's Travels saying "that didn't happen, that didn't happen", but whether you want to do literary criticism or theology depends upon your goal. And anything that gets people reading the Bible is good, yes? Especially if you sell Bibles.

All Biblical study raises questions, and study of the Bible as literature will point not only to the Bible's nature as a bunch of wildly different (and often contradictory) texts stuck together, but also its relationship to other literary traditions, such as the influence of classical literature on the New Testament. It does not in itself affect the Bible's truth, but maybe people shouldn't study the Bible too much (as the Roman Catholic church has believed for much of its history, such as when it banned vernacular translations of the Bible).

From a multicultural perspective

See the main article on this topic: Multiculturalism

Many of the writers on the Bible as literature have approached it as a defence of the western canon and of a body of literary tradition that must be preserved from philistinism and ignorance: many of the most prominent scholars also write on Shakespeare or Milton.