Big Questions: What is the Literary Context?

In the most recent post in this series on the ‘big questions’ that can help us read the Bible better we looked at the importance of understanding historical and cultural context. Today’s big question is also about the context of a given text, but is about the text in its immediate surroundings: What is the literary context? Literary context is again a broad category, but includes such ideas as genre and form, social register (i.e., how simple or ‘fancy’ a text is), and rhetorical strategies, as well as more basic things like what the passage is doing, and what comes before it and after it.

Why is understanding a passage’s literary context helpful? First, any time we read the Bible, we’re reading it in chunks. Very few of us will ever read a whole book in one sitting. And whether we are dividing it up ourselves in our private reading, or following a lectionary or reading plan, where we put our cuts is going to break up the book’s natural flow. Even if we follow the section breaks provided by our Bible translations, they can be arbitrary some times. Think how many readings you hear in Church start with connecting words like ‘therefore,’ or ‘thus’. Those words are cues that what we’re reading is logically connected to what came before. Similarly, books of the Bible aren’t random collections of stories or teachings, but are written, like any text, for a purpose and designed to accomplish that purpose. Therefore they make use of rhetorical structure (at its most basic: introduction, arguments, conclusion) and devices (types of argumentation). So, if we want to understand a given text, it’s helpful to know what role it’s playing in the overall structure of the book and how it’s playing it. This is also where literary genre comes into play, since different genres have different aims, and therefore different structures and rhetorical strategies. For example, first-century letters had a specific format, and understanding this can help us see what Paul is doing in his letters. (My favourite example is that, while Romans is often used as a theology manual, its clear thesis statement is that the Gospel reveals God’s justice to both Jews and Gentiles alike (1.16); everything that comes after is in defense of that thesis. Likewise, studying ancient literary forms revealed that the book of Hebrews is not in fact a letter, but follows more closely the conventions of ancient sermons. This again helps to put it and its message in context. Along a similar vein, traditionally, and to this day outside the most extreme forms of Protestantism, different parts of the Bible have been understood to be authoritative in different ways, so that something from the Old Testament is not applied in the same way as something in the New, or something in an apocalyptic text is not applied the same as something in the Gospels. So, paying attention to this — what we might call a text’s canonical context — can also be helpful for us.

These last points touch on the second reason why it’s helpful to ask questions about literary context: Like the questions of history and culture we looked at last time, understanding literary context is a way to help bridge the gap between us and a text. First-century literary conventions are not twenty-first-century literary conventions — to say nothing of the genres and forms from the Ancient Near East. The more we know about those historical conventions, the better we will understand where our texts are coming from.

Literary criticism has a lot of sub-disciplines, so before moving on, let’s define a few of the terms and see what they might contribute (note: all of these overlap quite a bit):

• Form criticism tries to understand how a text was composed. This can include things like genre, but also word choice and register. Sometimes, when for example a text suddenly has big changes in grammar, theme, or word choice, this can lead scholars to hypothesize about its internal history. This was the origin of the so-called ‘Documentary Hypothesis’ of the Pentateuch, which noticed for example, that not only were there doubles of several stories in the first five books of the Bible, but also that these pairs often contained different names for God and different themes. (e.g., the Genesis 1 creation story uses the generic term ‘God’ and takes a universal, cosmic, and optimistic view of creation, whereas the Genesis 2 creation story uses the covenant name for God, YHWH, and has a more psychological and pessimistic perspective.)
• Rhetorical criticism looks at a text’s internal structure, what it’s wanting to do, and the way it tries to do so. This explores both things like the different parts of certain literary forms (e.g., parts of a letter or speech) and rhetorical devices (e.g., (among many many others) chiasmus, which puts the most important point in the middle of an argument or story; dichotomy, which makes its point through comparison and contrast; or hyperbole, which uses exaggeration).
• Narrative criticism looks at a text (particularly a story) as a whole. It pays attention to things like setting, characters, symbolism, theme, and (again) rhetorical devices.
• Canonical criticism puts the book of the Bible from which a text is taken into the broader context of the Scriptures as a whole, or, in the example of the Psalms, which is itself a collection of texts, explores the order those texts are in in the book’s canonical form.

These disciplines are like an interpretive toolbox to help us better understand our Scriptures. But it’s important to remember that they aren’t understanding itself. A wrench is not the same thing as a plumbing job, even if it’s indispensable in completing that job. There was a tendency among some scholars, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to forget this, and mistake the findings of critical methodologies for the text’s meaning itself. But again they are just tools to help us get to a better understanding of a text.

Reflection Questions

1. What do you think the different purposes of the following literary genres might be?

a) Law

b) Prophecy

c) Folk Tale

d) Psalm

e) Gospel

f) Epistle

2. What particular literary questions would you think to ask about the following verses?

a) “When Methuselah had lived for one hundred and eighty-seven years, he became the father of Lamech. Methuselah lived after the birth of Lamech for seven hundred and eighty-two years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred and sixty-nine years; and he died.” (Genesis 5.25-27)

b) “Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night. They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper.

c) The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgement, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. (Psalm 1)