Article 2/4. The first article in this series showed that the Church asks Catholics to pay attention to the “literary forms” of Scripture. This article asks what a literary form is, and then looks at how forms work in two parts of the Bible that ordinary readers meet often: its stories and its poems.
What Are Literary Forms?
The word “literature” can mislead people. In this series it means writing that was put together with care and skill so that it could be heard or read as a whole. History, law, letters, and prayers count as literature just as much as stories and poems do. Calling a book of the Bible literature says nothing, by itself, about whether the events in it really happened.
A literary form is a pattern of writing that a writer and his main, intended audience both understand, due to their shared culture. The writer uses it because he expects his hearers to recognize it, and they understand him because they in fact do recognize it. Modern speaking and writing use such patterns all the time unconsciously. Nobody reads an obituary as a joke or hears “Once upon a time” and expects a news report, and no one had to take a class to learn these things.
Kevin Jackson, who writes about the small forms found in modern writing, observes that although “no one’s ever shown us the rules,” readers “understand a good deal more about the rules of (extremely) minor literary genres than polite society generally admits” (Jackson, Invisible Forms, introduction).
The difficulty with the Bible is that its forms belonged to people who lived two or three thousand years ago. Modern readers already have the habit of reading by form, but they do not know these particular forms. The scholar J. J. M. Roberts writes:
If one is going to read the Bible with any understanding at all, one must learn the scripts, the morphology, the syntax, the vocabulary, and the literary conventions of the languages and periods in which it was written. (Roberts, Bible and the Ancient Near East, 398)
While most people will never learn ancient Hebrew, we can learn the main forms the biblical writers used and what those forms were doing for their original audience.
From all this, two cautions follow. The first is that ancient forms do not always sync with modern ones. Today, a well-crafted story is less likely to be factual. The Old Testament scholar John Barton warns that “a highly-wrought narrative style tends to carry implications of fictivity; but this may not have been so for the biblical writers” (Barton, Old Testament, 123). An ancient historian could write with great artist skill and still report what happened.
The second caution is that the forms should be learned from the ancient texts themselves. Pius XII said this in 1943, when he wrote that the ancient ways of writing cannot be decided “in advance, but only after a careful examination of the ancient literature of the East” (Divino Afflante Spiritu 36). This is why cultural anthropology is so important to biblical studies.
Psalm 24 shows what such study can uncover. The psalm says, “Lift up your heads, O gates” (Ps 24:7). Roberts points out that “ancient Palestinian gates had no parts that moved up and down.” The line borrows its picture from an older Canaanite poem in which a god calls on a gathering of gods to lift up their heads. Israel’s poet put the Lord in place of the false god and the temple gates in place of the gathering of a divine council (Roberts, 105).
Knowing the background explains a strange image. It also shows that Israel took shared forms of writing and changed them to proclaim faith in the one true God.
Form at Work in Stories
Most Bible stories are rather spare. They rarely tell the reader about the subjective disposition of a character’s thoughts or feelings. And they often leave out details that a modern novelist would include. William Creasy, who teaches lay readers how to read the Bible as literature, uses the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22 as an example. God tells Abraham to offer his son. The very next thing the text says is that Abraham rose early in the morning (Gen 22:2–3). Nothing at all is said about the night in between. Then three days of travel pass in a single sentence (22:4). Creasy notes:
“the placement of the gaps and their size are a direct function of the narrator, who chooses what to tell the reader, when to tell it, how much to reveal, and in what sequence” (Creasy, Reading the Bible, 32).
The silence is part of the story and that is often what we miss as modern readers. This subtle device invites the reader to stand with Abraham through that long night and those three days in his shoes, pondering what is coming next. However, one must remember that filling these gaps is not a license for the reader to invent whatever he likes, but that this work “must be made legitimate by the text itself and not by personal desires” (Creasy, 146) of the reader. A stunning example is the opening of the story of David and Bathsheba. In 2 Samuel 11:1, the Hebrew text uses twenty-three words to describe Joab and the army going out to war. Then it uses just three Hebrew words for the king: “and David was sitting in Jerusalem.”
The Hebrew verb shows that David keeps sitting the whole time his army fights (Creasy, 148–149). The writer never accuses the king of neglecting his duty, because the proportion of the sentence gestures to that accusation it for him. A careful reader anticipates the fall of David before anything wrong has played out in the narrative.
Some of these signals are built into the grammar of Hebrew itself and are hard to see in English. Hebrew stories move forward through a chain of linked verbs, which English usually renders as “and he did … and he did.” Readers may find these chains tedious. A writer can stop the chain on purpose to give background. Genesis 39:1 does this after the side story of Judah and Tamar in chapter 38. The clause “Now Joseph had been taken down to Egypt” (in Lily Kahn’s rendering) pauses the action and brings the reader back to Joseph before the story moves on (Kahn, Verbal System in Late Enlightenment Hebrew, 244). Good English translations often mark these pauses with a word like “now” or with a change of tense to send the literary signal to English readers.
This quiet way of telling stories and crafting literature teaches something about God. In the Joseph story, God rarely appears like another character on stage. The brothers sell Joseph, he is falsely accused, and he sits in prison, and still God is at work through all of it. At the end Joseph says to his brothers, “You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good” (Gen 50:20). Barton argues that a mature sense of divine providence, of God’s hidden hand working behind the curtain, so to speak, comes in large part from the way Hebrew stories are told: “The picture of God we receive from Genesis 22 is a function of the chapter’s narrative style” (Barton, 231). A reader who expects God to be named in every scene will miss the point. In Barton’s words, “how is as important as what” (232).
Being attentive to the how of the literature is how a reader gets to the next level of biblical understanding. This is where the context of literary devices and forms can inform as much as the content (the “what”) of the narrative.
Form at Work in Poems
Semitic poetry is very different from Western poetry, which makes it harder to not only understand, but to appreciate it as it comes across in any English translation. Hebrew poetry starts with the short line, which is then paired with a second line that answers or responds to it. Many readers were taught that the second line simply repeats the first in different words. Scholars such as F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp and Elaine James have corrected this misunderstanding, pointing out that the second line moves the thought forward, makes it sharper, or makes it stronger. Dobbs-Allsopp describes the rhythm as “one step forward, iteration, and then another step forward” (Dobbs-Allsopp, On Biblical Poetry, 44–45). James adds that in this kind of poetry “mere statement of an idea is not sufficient, nor is it the point” (James, Invitation to Biblical Poetry, 57). A poem that says something twice, from two angles, is asking the reader to slow down and think about it. It is a poetry that rhymes ideas, not the final syllables at the end of each line.
The form of a poem can say things that its words do not state. Psalm 1 compares the good man to a tree planted by streams of water and the wicked to chaff that the wind blows away (Ps 1:3–4). Dobbs-Allsopp noticed that the tree is described in lines of normal length, while the chaff gets the three shortest lines in the poem: “The short run of short lines mimes the ephemerality of chaff that once tossed into the air disappears and is no more” (Dobbs-Allsopp, 126).
Form also works at the level of a whole poem. The psalms of lament usually follow a pattern. They begin with a complaint, move to a request, and end with trust or praise. Psalm 88 begins in the usual way by calling on “the God of my salvation” (Ps 88:1; NABRE 88:2), and it makes its complaint. Then, where trust should come, it ends in darkness. James argues that this broken pattern is the point: “The moral force of this poem lies in the poet’s rejection of the form” (James, 89). A reader who does not know the pattern will think Psalm 88 is simply sad. A reader who knows it will see that the psalm teaches something about prayer. God receives even the prayer that has not yet found its way to praise.
Knowing the how the form of lament takes shape also helps with some of the hardest verses in the Bible. For instance, Psalm 137 ends with a wish that the children of Babylon be dashed against the rock. James explains that this “is not the language of victors in celebration, it is the language of victims in despair” (James, 165). The words are still hard. They make sense as prayer only when a reader sees that they come from people who had lost everything and were pouring out their extreme pain to God.
What This Means for Readers
Stories and especially poems transport meaning to the audience through their forms as well as their words. A gap, a pause, a repeated phrase, a short line, or a deliberately broken pattern can be the very place where the sacred author’s meaning is found. Developing the ability and attention to notice these things does not require a degree in ancient languages. It requires plenty of patience, a good translation of the Bible, and the habit of asking what kind of literary form a passage is before rushing to interpretation.
The next article takes up the most serious objection to this way of reading.