Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 147:585 (Jan 1990)
Article: The Bible as Literature Part 1: “Words of Delight”: The Bible as Literature
Author: Leland Ryken

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The Bible as Literature
Part 1:
“Words of Delight”: The Bible as Literature

Leland Ryken

Professor of English
Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois

[Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of four articles delivered by the author as the W. H. Griffith Thomas Lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, November 7–10, 1989.]

Evangelicals are witnessing a paradigm shift in how biblical scholars study and discuss the Bible. This shift involves not only a growing awareness that much of the Bible is literature but also a tendency to use the methods of literary criticism when analyzing the Bible. Evangelicals should participate in this movement, which holds immense promise but which to date has been dominated by nonevangelicals. What is required is not only a receptivity to a literary approach but also an awareness of what constitutes a genuinely literary approach.

Interest in a Literary Approach to the Bible

New winds are blowing in biblical studies. The most immediate evidence is the titles of new books. Though titles like the following are still a minority, they are increasingly common: Matthew as Story;1 Irony in the Fourth Gospel;2 Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel;3 The Literary Guide to the Bible.4 Or consider the

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following table of contents from a recent commentary on the Gospel of John: Narrator and Point of View; Narrative Time; Plot; Characters; Implicit Commentary; The Implied Reader.

Even more telling, perhaps, is the way in which literary terms are now smuggled into titles where they seem to have been dragged in gratuitously: Call to Discipleship: A Literary Study of Mark’s Gospel;5 The Christocentric Literary Structure of the Fourth Gospel.6 Feminist studies of the Bible typically advertise themselves as a literary approach. Some other commentaries whose titles promise a literary approach in fact turn out to follow the familiar contours of conventional Bible commentaries. Titles such as those mentioned above point to a scholarly fad that will be a dominant influence on biblical scholarship for the foreseeable future. In liberal scholarship it is already replacing the long-standing obsession with tracing supposed stages of composition in a biblical text.

The movement toward literary approaches to the Bible began two decades ago in h...