How to Read the Bible as Literature: . . . and Get More Out of It

by Leland Ryken

  Questions to Ask of Hero Stories

  Since a literary hero incarnates a society’s views of reality, morality, and values, the following issues are good ones to explore when reflecting on hero stories.

  The view of people. What kind of beings are people? How can people achieve meaning in life? What is the proper end or goal for a person? What is humanity’s origin and what is its destination?

  The religious view. Does the story postulate a transcendental realm? If so, what is its nature? How is the other world related to this world? How can a person be vitally related to God?

  The view of society. What is the nature of the human community? What is the individual’s role in society? What is the nature of the individual’s obligations to his or her fellow humans?

  The question of values. What does the story postulate as the highest value in life? Is it a person (God, self, some individual, people in general), an institution (state, church, home), an abstract quality (love, truth, beauty, order), or something physical like nature?

  SUMMARY

  Hero stories focus on the struggles and triumphs of the protagonist. The central hero or heroine is representative of a whole group and is usually a largely exemplary character, at least by the end of the story. The hero or heroine’s destiny is an implied comment about life and reality.

  EPIC

  A Definition of Epic

  Epic is a species within the class of heroic narrative. It is long narrative, a hero story on the grand scale. A single heroic narrative does not rate as an epic because it lacks epic scope. Epic is an encyclopedic form that includes as much as possible. Northrop Frye calls it “the story of all things.”4 Epic is so expansive that it sums up a whole age; one scholar claims that “the supreme role of epic lies in its capacity to focus a society’s self-awareness.”5

  The Story of a Nation

  As part of this expansiveness, epic always has a strong nationalistic interest. The epic hero’s story deals with more than a personal destiny; his story represents the destiny of a whole nation. Historical allusions therefore abound in epics, which tend to portray the significant and formative events in the life of a nation. The “great primary epics deal with their cultures at some primitive moment of crisis.”6 Common epic motifs include kingdom, conquest, warfare, and dominion. In one way or another, epic portrays epoch-making events in the life of a nation.

  Supernatural Element

  Supernatural settings, characters, and events have always been a hallmark of epic. Events in such stories occur on a cosmic stage that includes an “other” world as well as the earth. Supernatural agents enter the human world and participate in the action. This, too, is one of the means by which epics give us images of greatness and mystery.

  Epic Structure

  Despite its expansiveness, an epic is tightly structured. One authority, after listing “amplitude, breadth, inclusiveness” as epic traits, goes on to say that “exuberance. . .is not enough in itself; there must be a control commensurate with the amount included.”7 Epics therefore always have a unifying hero. The action is constructed around a central epic feat, which usually consists of winning a battle and establishing a kingdom. Many epics have been structured as a quest toward a goal. Because of its sheer length and scope, an epic always has a mildly episodic plot (we can’t remember the whole story at once, for example), but the wealth of detail is firmly controlled by an overall design.

  The Epic of the Exodus

  The most obviously epic work in the Bible is the epic of the Exodus. For literary purposes, the key narrative sections are Exodus 1–20 and 32–34; Numbers 10–14, 16–17, and 20–24; and Deuteronomy 32–34 (a retrospective interpretive framework for the whole epic, from the mouth of the epic hero himself). Several things make the story of the Exodus an epic. It meets the test of long narrative. It is nationalistic in emphasis, recording the formation of Israel as a nation and depicting the decisive events in the early history of the nation. This story, composed at a moment of national self-consciousness, was a definitive repository of the religious, moral, and political ideals of the society that produced it. The story is set in history and filled with historical allusions. It is unified partly by a normative hero and partly by the quest for the Promised Land. The world of the story is alive with supernatural intervention.

  Old Testament Historical Books

  If the historical chronicles of the Old Testament are to be approached as literature, epic is a fruitful rubric under which to study them. The Book of Joshua, for example, is unified by the motif of Israel’s conquest of Canaan and its quest to establish itself in the Promised Land, all under the direction of Joshua. The Book of Judges lacks a unifying hero and is perhaps better viewed as a collection of separate hero stories, though certain features of the book resemble epic. The story of David is definitely an epic story. David, in fact, is the closest parallel in the Bible to the epic hero of the Western tradition: he is the warrior who conquers his enemies, the political ruler, and the representative person of his culture.

  Genesis

  The Book of Genesis also approximates the epic genre. It is atypical in having four patriarchs instead of a single hero as the epic protagonist. But in other respects it meets epic expectations. It is a moderately long story that traces the early ancestry of a nation. Because of the covenant theme that pervades the story, it is a story of destiny. This is much more than the history of individual heroes or even of a family; it is nothing less than the beginning of salvation history, the history of the whole human race viewed from the perspective of God’s acts of redemption and judgment. And Genesis possesses to a greater degree than perhaps any other biblical story the quality of elemental human experience that epic is so adept at capturing.

  The Book of Revelation

  The New Testament Book of Revelation is also an epic, though not exactly a typical one. It is a story of great and heightened battle conducted in part by supernatural beings using supernatural means of warfare. The setting is cosmic. The story recounts the exploits of a hero who conquers his enemies and establishes his eternal empire. There are scenes set in heaven, where decisions are made that are then enacted on earth, in a manner reminiscent of the councils of the gods in conventional epics. There are also visions of future history, another epic convention. And the style of Revelation is closer to the exalted style of conventional epic than is true of any other book in the Bible. Revelation is filled with similes, catalogs, epithets, allusions, repeated formulas, and sheer verbal and imagistic exuberance.

  The Epic Aura of the Bible

  Although the Pentateuch, the Book of Joshua, the story of David, and the Book of Revelation are the only full-fledged epics in the Bible, it is also apparent that the Bible as a whole is frequently epic-like. It has the “feel” of other ancient epic literature. The continuous presence of God as a character in the stories alone would make it similar to epic literature. The nationalistic tone and focus of the Old Testament lend an epic aura to the stories and even to the prophecies. The framework of epic literature, therefore, is continuously relevant to the literary study of biblical narrative, and other epics are more likely to furnish literary parallels than modern novels.

  COMEDY

  Comic Plots

  When speaking of comedy as a type of story, literary critics do not mean a humorous story but rather one with a certain shape of plot. Comedy is the story of the happy ending. It is usually a U-shaped story that begins in prosperity, descends into tragedy, and rises again to end happily. The first phase of this pattern is often omitted, but the upward movement from misery to happiness is essential.

  Story Elements in a Comic Plot

  The main elements of such a comic plot are easy to identify. The overall progression is from problem to solution, from bondage to freedom. The plot consists of a series of obstacles that must be overcome en route to the happy ending. Often these obstacles are characters who stand in the way of happiness, but external circumstances or inner personality trai
ts can also constitute the obstacles to fulfillment. In comic stories the protagonist is gradually assimilated into society (in contrast to tragedy, where the hero becomes progressively isolated from society). The typical ending of a comedy is a marriage, feast, reconciliation, or victory over enemies. Two contrasting ways of concluding a comic story are the conversion of villainous characters and the expulsion of such characters from the scene of festivity or triumph.

  Plot Devices

  The overall comic movement from bondage to freedom is accompanied by a host of familiar story elements that have become virtually synonymous with literary comedy: disguise, mistaken identity, character transformation from bad to good, surprise, miracle, providential assistance to good characters, sudden reversal of misfortune, rescue from disaster, poetic justice, the motif of lost and found, reversal of conventional expectations (as when the younger child is preferred over the older), sudden release. Whereas tragedy stresses what is inevitable, comedy is built around the unforeseeable.

  Comedy as the Dominant Biblical Form

  It is a commonplace of literary criticism that comedy rather than tragedy is the dominant narrative form of the Bible and the Christian gospel.8 The Bible as a whole begins with a perfect world, descends into the misery of fallen history, and ends with a new world of total happiness and victory over evil. Within this overall comic structure occur numerous smaller U-shaped stories of the type described above. Perhaps the stories of Joseph and Ruth are prototypical, but in fact such stories dominate biblical narrative. There are even stories (including the Book of Job and the four Gospels) that are often considered to be tragedies but that are actually comic in structure if we take the ending of the story into account.

  TRAGEDY

  Tragedy has held an honored position in literature generally. It is less pervasive in the Bible than in literature as a whole, but it is nonetheless an important biblical form.

  The Story of a Fall

  At the level of plot or action, tragedy is the story of exceptional calamity. It portrays a movement from prosperity to catastrophe. Because it depicts a change of fortune, tragedy must be differentiated from pathos, which depicts unmitigated suffering from the very start. Tragedy focuses on what we most fear and wish to avoid facing—the destructive potential of evil.

  The Tragic Hero

  In tragedy the focus is on the tragic protagonist, who until modern times was a person of high social standing. Such a tragic hero, usually a king or ruler, is greater than common humanity, though not superior to the natural order and to moral criticism. The high position of a tragic hero at the beginning of the story goes beyond his or her belonging to the social elite; this exalted figure is understood to be representative of general humanity. Ordinarily a tragic hero possesses something that we can call greatness of spirit. All of this grandeur is brought tumbling down by a final trait of the tragic hero—a tragic flaw of character. Aristotle’s word for it was hamartia (translated “sin” in the New Testament), a missing of the mark. Aristotle described it as “some great error or frailty,” some “defect which is painful or destructive.” In other words, tragedy always portrays caused suffering.

  The Plot of Tragedy

  The plot of tragedy focuses on human choice. The story begins with the protagonist facing a dilemma that demands a choice. Drawn in two or more directions, the tragic hero makes a tragic choice that leads inevitably to catastrophe and suffering. This means that a tragic hero is always responsible for the downfall (since it is the result of choice and action by the hero). Usually the tragic hero is also deserving of the downfall, since the choice involved some frailty of character (though in literary tragedy generally the punishment is disproportionately great compared with the fault). Often a tragic hero achieves some measure of moral perception as a result of his or her suffering.

  A Definition of Tragedy

  To summarize, tragic stories tend to unfold according to the following tragic pattern of action: dilemma /choice /catastrophe /suffering /perception/ death. Tragedy can be defined as a narrative form in which a protagonist of high degree and greatness of spirit undertakes an action (makes a choice) within a given tragic world and as a result inevitably falls from prosperity to a state of physical and spiritual suffering, sometimes attaining perception.

  Biblical Tragedies

  The prototypical biblical tragedy is the story of the Fall in Genesis 3. The great masterpiece of biblical tragedy is the story of Saul in 1 Samuel.9 If we keep in mind that tragedy assigns a specific cause to the hero’s downfall and localizes the beginning of woe at a particular point in the hero’s life, the story of David as narrated in 1 and 2 Samuel adheres to a tragic pattern, since David’s tragic sufferings begin with the Bathsheba/Uriah incident. The story of Samson (Judg. 13–16) is also a tragedy. Some of the parables of Jesus also enact the tragic pattern.10

  The Book of Job and the Gospels

  In addition to these full-fledged tragedies, there are two major instances of biblical narrative where the definition of literary tragedy partly fits the story, even though the story as a whole is comic. Because tragedy deals with human suffering, the Book of Job has repeatedly been discussed in terms of literary tragedy, although the story as a whole has the U-shaped movement and happy ending of comedy. The same situation is true of the four Gospels: they conclude with the happy ending of a comic plot, but much of the action before that falls into the pattern of literary tragedy.11

  The Relative Absence of Tragedy in the Bible

  The most remarkable thing about the Bible and literary tragedy is that there are so few tragedies in the Bible. In a book so concerned with sin and the judgment upon sin, we might expect to find an abundance of tragedy. Yet as Northrop Frye puts it, “The Bible is not very friendly to tragic themes.”12 The Bible focuses its attention on the redemptive potential of human tragedy. While never minimizing the facts of human evil and suffering, the Bible is, however, preoccupied with more than what is tragic in human suffering. The result is a collection of stories of potential tragedy—stories on which a modern writer could base a tragedy but which in their biblical version avoid a tragic ending through the intervention of human repentance and divine forgiveness.

  Further Reading

  Even when critics do not use the term “heroic narrative,” the commonest approach to the stories of the Old Testament is some version of what I have defined under that heading. Specimens of such commentary can be found in Images of Man and God: Old Testament Short Stories in Literary Focus, ed. Burke O. Long (Sheffield: Almond, 1981). Explications of selected Old Testament stories are given in my book The Literature of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974) in chapters on heroic narrative (pp. 45-78), the epic of the Exodus (pp. 81-92), and biblical tragedy (pp. 95-106).

  1Walter Houghton and G. Robert Stange, ed., Victorian Poetry and Poetics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), xxiii.

  2Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1957), 73.

  3Frank Kermode, “Interpretive Continuities and the New Testament,” Raritan, Spring 1982, 36.

  4The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 3.

  5Hugh M. Richmond, The Christian Revolutionary: John Milton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 124.

  6Richmond, 124.

  7E. M. W. Tillyard, The English Epic and Its Background (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966), 6, 8.

  8For good discussions, see the following: Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 49–98; Nelvin Vos, The Drama of Comedy: Victim and Victor (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1966); Paul H. Grawe, Comedy in Space, Time, and the Imagination (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1983), 267–99; Northrop Frye, The Great Code (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 169–98.

  9The best discussion of a biblical tragedy that I have seen is the analysis of the Saul story by Edwin M. Good, Ir
ony in the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1965), 56–80.

  10For a preliminary discussion, see Dan Otto Via, Jr., The Parables: Their Literary and Existential Dimension (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), especially 110–44.

  11On the tragic dimension of the Gospels, see especially Roger L. Cox, “Tragedy and the Gospel Narratives,” Yale Review, 57 (1968), 545–70; and Gilbert G. Bilezikian, The Liberated Gospel: A Comparison of the Gospel of Mark and Greek Tragedy (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1977).

  12The Great Code, 181.

  Chapter Four

  The Poetry of the Bible

  The Prevalence of Poetry in the Bible

  NEXT TO STORY, poetry is the most prevalent type of writing in the Bible. Some books of the Bible are entirely poetic in form: Psalms, Song of Solomon, Proverbs, Lamentations. Many others are mainly poetic: Job, Ecclesiastes (in which even the prose passages achieve poetic effects), Isaiah, Hosea, Joel, and numerous other prophetic books. There is no book in the Bible that does not require the ability to interpret poetry to some degree, because every book includes some figurative language. Even the speech of Jesus and the writing in the New Testament epistles make consistent use of concrete imagery and figures of speech.