by Leland Ryken
An additional rule for interacting with biblical stories is this: in reading or discussing the stories of the Bible, analyze exactly how the narrative generates interest, curiosity, or suspense.
The Presence of a Central Protagonist
Every story has a central character. This is simply one of the principles of selectivity and emphasis that storytellers impose on their material. The central character is called the protagonist of the story, and the forces arrayed against him or her are the antagonists.
Readers and interpreters of biblical stories would do much better with these stories than they often do if they followed a very simple rule: pay attention to what happens to the protagonist in the story. Stories are built around the protagonist. You can’t go far wrong with a story if you simply go through the action as the observant traveling companion of the protagonist in the story.
The Protagonist’s Experiment in Living
There are several related points that are equally practical. It is helpful to view the protagonist of the story as someone who undertakes an experiment in living. This experiment in living is tested during the course of the action, and its final success or failure is a comment on the adequacy of the protagonist’s morality or world view on which the experiment was based. Abraham’s life, for example, is a venture in faith. Called by God and given nothing more tangible than some promises, Abraham packs up his belongings and follows God’s call. He has momentary lapses of faith, but his experiment in living is ultimately vindicated. He is blessed by God and dies at peace with himself and the world.
Teaching by Negative Example
A protagonist’s experiment in living might be weighed in the balance and found wanting. Once Saul has been propelled into the kingship of Israel, his experiment in leadership is to maintain his popularity with the people by doing what is expedient instead of obeying God. The tragic form into which the story is cast becomes a negative interpretation of Saul’s experiment in living, showing that it failed.
The Protagonist as Our Representative
A related principle is that the protagonist of a story is intended to be representative or exemplary of a whole segment of humanity, and perhaps of the whole human race. That is in part why writers choose to tell a given story. In the words of the modern fiction writer Flannery O’Connor, “Any character . . . is supposed to carry a burden of meaning larger than himself.”8 This universality is, in fact, one of the distinctive features of literature, as theorists from Aristotle on have noted. To test whether a story has this quality of being perpetually up-to-date is simple: if we can see our own experience in the events and characters of the story, the story has captured something universal about life. Every sermon based on a biblical narrative assumes that what happens to the characters in the story is somehow a model of the enduring human situation.
A Literary Approach Stresses the Universality of a Story
This shows the difference between a literary approach to the Bible and a historical approach. The task of the historian is to record what happened; the task of the literary storyteller is to tell us what happens. The two ways of recording events can be combined; in the Bible they have been combined, and biblical stories can therefore be approached as history as well as literature. The literary approach is one that explores the story as an experience with enduring relevance. We should perhaps note that this approach has more in common with preaching and ordinary Bible reading than the more historical interests of specialized biblical scholars.
The foregoing discussion of the protagonist in biblical stories yields an important principle for reading biblical narrative: look upon the protagonist’s experiment in living as a comment about a significant aspect of human life and values.
Narrative Unity
Stories are unified wholes. In any well-told story there is a unifying framework within which everything in the story finds a place. Few things are as debilitating to a discussion of a biblical story than a failure to lay out the unifying pattern(s) of the story. In the absence of such a framework, the story remains a series of disjointed and isolated fragments. Three basic principles on which stories are built are unity, coherence, and emphasis. These are, perhaps, the last things we discover as we read through a story, since they are not fully evident until the story is finished. But the unity and coherence of a story are virtually the first things we should mention when discussing a biblical story.
Identifying Where a Story Begins and Ends
One of the first things to do with a story is to determine its precise boundaries. This involves deciding where the story begins and ends within the surrounding biblical text. Sometimes this delineation depends on a reader’s or commentator’s purpose at the moment. For example, it is quite possible to treat the story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac (Gen. 22) as a self-contained story. But that same material becomes only an episode if we are discussing the story of Abraham as a whole.
Dividing a Story into Scenes or Episodes
Determining the shape of a story entails not only fixing its boundaries but also dividing it into its scenes or episodes. A good study Bible has already done most of this work for the reader. It is important to attach accurate headings to each scene or episode, since these units become the major building blocks in constructing our conception of the overall movement of the story. Once we have determined the overall shape and individual episodes of a story, we can proceed to the further question of narrative unity.
Unity of Hero
Narrative unity can be of several types. Aristotle theorized that the unifying element in a story is a “unity of plot. . . , not as some persons think. . .unity of hero.” This is generally true, but Aristotle underestimated the ability of a literary hero to impose a satisfactory unity on a story. Even in stories that have unity of plot, the presence of the protagonist throughout the action also lends unity to the story. When we recall the stories of Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Ruth, Esther, and Jesus, our impressions of the stories organize themselves partly around the hero or heroine.
Episodic Plots
When a story is unified only by the presence of the hero, and not by a corresponding unity of action, its plot is called episodic. In such a story, the events succeed each other but do not form a cause-effect chain in which one event produces the next. The episodes in such a story can be rearranged or deleted without destroying the flow of the story. Such episodic plots are rare but not unknown in the Bible. The first six chapters of Daniel are six separate ordeals, joined only by the fact that they all involve Daniel or his acquaintances. The story of David is even more episodic. The Gospels, despite the presence of unifying motifs and a general chronological movement, are basically episodic plots.
Unity of Action
In general, however, narrative unity implies that a story deals with one action. Out of the mass of events that constitute the life of a person, the storyteller selects a single action for the purpose of a given story. The story of Gideon, for example, is unified by more than the presence of the hero throughout the story; it is a single action— Gideon’s conquest of the Midianites. The story of Jacob is built around the hero’s struggle with his own character flaws and his family. The story of Joseph is unified by the hero’s quest to fulfill the destiny announced at the very beginning of the story. Out of all the things the author might have written about Ruth, the storyteller selected details that contribute to the motif of Ruth’s quest for a home in a foreign land.
Multiple Plots
Occasionally a story in the Bible is sufficiently complex to be called a multiple plot. But even in those cases the action is carefully controlled and shaped. Each thread of action, when isolated from the others, meets the test of being a single, self-contained action with a beginning, middle, and end. The story of Abraham is a good example. It consists of at least four interrelated but discernible actions: (1) the chronological shape of the hero’s life from age seventy-five to his death; (2) the progressive revelation of the covenant that God repeatedly
announces to Abraham; (3) the quest for a son and descendants and land; (4) the hero’s struggle between faith and expediency. The plot is multiple, but it is not episodic, because each thread of action follows the principles of coherence and unity.
Cause-Effect Connections Among Events
Unity of plot implies not only that the writer has selected details to fit a single action—it also implies the principle of causal coherence among the events. A unified plot is not a mere succession or accumulation of events but a sequence of events that are linked by a chain of cause and effect. In a famous reformulation of Aristotle’s theory that episodes in a story follow one another by “probable or necessary sequence,” novelist E. M. Forster wrote that the mere sequence “the king died and then the queen died” does not constitute a plot. But the statement “the king died and then the queen died of grief” does contain a plot in kernel form.9 For me, the most convenient test of whether a story has such causal coherence is to begin at the end of a story and march backward through the main events. (Others may prefer to start at the beginning and proceed to the end.) If, for each major episode, I can say that a given event happened because of the previous one, the story has causal coherence.
How to Discern Coherence
How important is it to engage in such plot analysis? There can be no doubt that the concentrated impact of a story depends heavily on the presence of causal coherence. Plots that are too loose or random make weak stories. Furthermore, a story will remain largely a series of fragments in the reader’s mind unless he or she has some framework for recognizing the coherence among the episodes. Analyzing the cause-effect connections between events in a story is one good way to discern the coherence of a story.
Other ways of becoming aware of the coherence of stories may work just as well, such as simply being alert to how a character or situation changes or progresses or is reinforced as we move from one event to the next. In hero stories, for example, each episode turns out to be a variation on the theme of defining the hero, but close scrutiny usually reveals that with each successive episode we learn something new about the hero, and often the very order in which we learn those things is important.
Charting the Progress of a Story
To discern the unity of stories with multiple plots, it is useful to arrange the unifying patterns into a chart or diagram. In the story of Abraham, for example, we can isolate four main narrative concerns: (1) defining the hero; (2) progressive revelation of the covenant; (3) the quest for a son and descendants; (4) the conflict between faith and expediency. The diagram on page 48 allows us to see at a glance what motifs appear in the successive episodes.
Several things stand out. The only motif that is picked up in every episode is the emerging portrait of the hero, confirming that the literary family of the story is heroic narrative and demonstrating that unity of hero dominates the story. The diagram also shows that the storyteller had a good grasp of the narrative principle of variety; he avoided monotony by picking and choosing among the various narrative threads (never, however, leaving a given narrative concern untouched for too long). The chart suggests at a glance how interrelated the various levels of action are. It also shows that the hero’s vacillation between faith and expediency persists nearly to the end of the story (being decisively resolved in Genesis 22, the episode of the sacrifice of Isaac). The completed diagram also confirms that Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son is the climax of the whole story, since all the main actions converge at this late point in the story.
Relating Individual Episodes to the Overriding Framework
Mainly, though, the chart underscores the principle that we must recognize in every narrative, even one that has a single plot line: it is crucial to see how a given episode relates to the overriding framework(s) of the story. Individual episodes in a story are not self-contained but exist in the context of the whole story. As Aristotle said regarding the individual episodes of a story, “We must see that they are relevant to the action.” With or without the use of a diagram, relating episodes to the overall framework(s) of a story is the most important way of grasping the unity of the narrative and the best antidote to the fragmentation that weakens so many discussions of biblical stories.
One of the most crucial of all rules for reading the stories of the Bible is therefore this one: analyze in detail the unity of the story, noting how each episode relates to the overriding framework(s) and how the episodes relate to each other in the unfolding progress of the story.
The interaction of setting, characters, and plot is the foundation of any story. There is, however, much more to the dynamics of biblical narrative than this foundation. Biblical storytellers invariably make use of additional narrative devices.
The Test Motif in Stories
One of the commonest of all the strategies that storytellers use is to put the protagonist into situations that test him or her. Almost every major episode in the story of Abraham, for example, turns out to be a test of his faith. The story of Esther is organized around the test of the heroine’s loyalty at a time of national crisis. King Saul’s obedience to God is tested in the battles against the Philistines (1 Sam. 13:8–15) and the Amalekites (1 Sam. 15). Jesus’ teachings and claims about himself are repeatedly tested by his antagonists in the Gospels.
Types of Tests: 1. Tests of Physical Strength or Courage
The tests of the hero can be of several types. Tests of physical strength and endurance, especially on the battlefield, have appealed most to storytellers through the centuries, and the Bible has its share of such stories. One thinks of the famous stories of David and Goliath, Samson and the Philistines, Jael and Sisera, Gideon and the Midianites.
2. Tests of Resourcefulness
Other stories test the hero’s resourcefulness or cleverness. In the story of the stolen blessing (Gen. 27), Jacob’s ability to trick his father is tested from the moment he enters his father’s presence. Ehud’s lefthanded trickiness is tested in the grim story of his assassination of Eglon (Judg. 3:15–30). David’s resourcefulness is tested in such incidents as his flight from Saul and his capture by Achish, king of Gath (see 1 Sam. 21:10–15 for the latter).
3. Mental or Psychological Tests
Generally, though, biblical storytellers prefer more subtle types of tests than those involving physical strength or resourcefulness. One category is the mental or psychological testing of the protagonist. In the Old Testament, the hero with an ability to interpret dreams is the counterpart of the modern detective who can solve ingenious crimes. Other types of inner testing are also common in the Bible. For example, Joseph’s willingness to forgive his brothers and conquer his impulse to take revenge is sorely tested when his brothers show up in Egypt. Elijah’s ability to persist in his calling as a prophet is tested when Jezebel threatens to kill him (1 Kings 19). Job’s patience is tested in his suffering, while the ability of Moses to withstand the pressure of adverse public opinion is repeatedly tested in the story of the Exodus. Many a biblical hero finds his or her courage tested by threatening situations.
4. Moral or Spiritual Tests
The most profound type of testing is moral or spiritual. We think at once of Potiphar’s wife tempting Joseph to commit adultery with her, or Daniel’s dilemma when the command to worship the emperor is published, or David’s fiasco with Bathsheba and Uriah, or Satan’s temptation of Jesus. What is tested in such stories is the protagonist’s faith in God or obedience to God’s moral law.
The test motif is pervasive in the stories of the Bible. Whenever it is present, it is a good framework for organizing the story. Usually it is also a key to the story’s meaning.
The Centrality of Choice in Stories
A related feature of stories is that they focus on the choices of the characters in the story. Stories concentrate on the person at the crossroads. Consequently, many stories are structured around the threefold principle of the antecedents, occurrence, and consequences of a crucial choice. The story of Esther is a good
example. For three chapters we read about a series of events that finally converge to put Esther in the critical position of being the only one who can appeal to the king to save her nation. Chapter 4 focuses on her heroic choice to risk herself for her nation. The rest of the story suspensefully narrates how she gradually carries through on her choice to confront the king, and on what happens when she does.
Choice as the Heroic Act
Many a biblical protagonist achieves full heroic stature in the moment of choice. The choice, indeed, is what the story is finally about. We can recall Abraham choosing to leave his native land in obedience to the call of God, or his later choosing to obey God’s command to sacrifice Isaac. We remember Moses refusing to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter and choosing to identify with the Israelites, or Ruth choosing to stay with Naomi, or Daniel’s three friends refusing to bow down to the emperor’s statue, or Jesus choosing to submit to God’s will in the Garden of Gethsemane.
The prominence of testing and choice in the stories of the Bible has a corresponding rule for reading and discussing them: identify the exact nature of the tests that protagonists undergo or the choices they make, observing how the story is structured around these tests or choices and noting how leading themes of the story are related to testing and choice.