One of the few things that unites all Christians is a love for the Bible. But, the Bible is a difficult document — or rather, library of documents — to approach, having been written by dozens of voices in different cultures and languages, across a period of roughly a thousand years, the most recent pieces of which are two thousand years old now. This means that the Bible needs to be approached with care and consideration. It must be interpreted. Last year, in the first series in a larger ‘Reading the Bible Better’ project, I explored the different ways people of faith have approached understanding the Bible across history. My goal was to demonstrate that, if nothing else, there has never been just ‘one way’ of reading the Scriptures, and when we read them ourselves, we’re making interpretive choices — whether explicitly or implicitly — on how we do so. Now, here in phase two of ‘Reading the Bible Better’, I’m going to look at different biblical genres. These are the different styles of literature in which the Bible was written. Just as we don’t expect a Shakespearean tragedy to function the same way as a poem by e.e. cummings, or a romance novel to play by the same rules as a piece of literary fiction (as problematic as that term is), so too is the Bible written in different genres, and we do it a great disservice when we fail to recognize that and flatten it and treat every part of it as though it were playing by the same rules. Understanding literary genres can help us to read the Bible on its own terms, even as we recognize that we always come to it from our own terms, values, and expectations.
Without further ado, here is the series:
Matthew Root 