Bibliotheca Sacra 147 (April 1990) 131-42
Copyright © 1990 by
The Bible
as Literature
Part 2 (of 4 parts):
"And It Came to
Pass": The Bible
as
God's Storybook
Leland Ryken
Professor of English
According to a rabbinic saying, God made people
because He
loves stories. Henry R. Luce, founder of Time magazine, commenting
on his magazine's interest in personalities,
quipped, "Time didn't
start this emphasis on stories about people; the
Bible did." One of
the most universal human impulses can be summed up
in the familiar
four-word plea, "Tell me a story." The
Bible constantly satisfies
this human longing for stories. Once when I wondered
which passage
to choose for the midweek Bible study, my son
commented, "Choose a
story, not a poem."
Scholarly interest in biblical narrative has
never been higher
than it currently is. In fact the literary approach
to the Bible is al-
most synonymous with a narrative approach. Narratology is a
thriving enterprise that cuts across disciplinary
lines.
The Narrative Shape of
the Bible as a Whole
One of the attractions a narrative approach to
the Bible offers
is its way of seeing the Bible as a whole.
Educational research has
established that the biggest variable in a learner's
ability to assim-
ilate data is the presence or
absence of a unifying framework within
which to place individual items. Viewing the Bible as
a story pro-
vides such a framework for the Bible as a whole.
To demonstrate that the big pattern in the Bible
is a narrative
pattern, all one need do is consider the things
that make up a story.
The
soul of a story, said Aristotle, is plot. This is a way of saying
131
132 Bibliotheca
Sacra / April-June 1990
that the most essential ingredient of a story,
without which it could
not exist, is a sequence of events. The essence of
plot, in turn, is a con-
flict around which the whole
action revolves.
Above all else, the Bible is a series of events,
with many inter-
spersed passages that interpret
the events. From beginning to end,
moreover, the Bible is arranged around a central
plot conflict be-
tween good and evil in a way
that a newspaper, a history book, a
book of sermons, or a systematic theology never is.
In terms of its
overall organization, the Bible obeys the
dynamics of narrative by
its reliance on a central plot made up of
individual episodes.
Stories, moreover, consist of interaction among
characters. Such
interaction is different from the usual forms of
historical writing,
such as the chronicle of events, character profiles,
and catalogs of ac-
complishments. The Bible has the
nature of a story, since it is full of
interaction among characters. Dialogue is prominent
in the Bible.
The
Bible is filled with voices speaking and replying. In fact the in-
cidence of direct quotation of
speeches in the Bible stood without
parallel until the modern novel was born.
Another feature of stories is that they focus on
the choices of the
characters. There is a corresponding element of
suspense, surprise,
and discovery in a story. The rhythm of a story
rests on three ques-
tions: How did it start? What
happened next (and next ...)? How
did it turn out? This narrative logic is partly
what accounts for the
sway that stories hold over people's attention.
The Bible, like other stories, is about human
choices. In the
Bible
people's difficulties did not arise from the hostility of the ex-
ternal world, which only
provides the occasion for people to
choose
for or against God. People's moral and spiritual
choices in history
are the heart of the matter. Chesterton once
commented on the nar-
rative quality of the
Christian faith:
Christianity concentrates on the man at the
crossroads.... The true
philosophy is concerned with the
instant. Will a man take this road or
that?-that is the only thing
to think about.... The instant is really aw-
ful: and it is because our
religion has intensely felt the instant that it .. .
is full of danger, like a boy's book: it is at an
immortal crisis.1
Another feature of stories is that they consist
of events that fit
together with unity, coherence, and shapeliness.
According to Aris-
totle, a story has a
beginning, a middle, and an end. On this score,
too, the Bible as a whole makes up a story. Its
beginning is literally
the beginning-God's creation of the world and His
placing of Adam
and Eve in the garden. The middle is the universal
history of the
1 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908; reprint, Garden City,
NY: Image Books, 1959),
p. 136.
"And It Came to Pass": The
Bible as God's Storybook 133
human race. And the end is literally the end-the end
of history.
Wilder
has written that "God is an active and purposeful God and
his action with and for men has a beginning, a middle
and an end
like any good story."2
The overall shapeliness of the Bible is
impressive. It is a U-
shaped cycle that moves from the beginning to the end
of time. It be-
gins with two people in a garden and ends with a
multitude that no
one can number in a city. In the words of Frye,
"The Bible as a whole
presents
a gigantic cycle from creation to apocalypse."3 By ending
where it did not begin, the Bible follows a basic
principle of stories.
The
element of progression is strong as the story line of the Bible is
followed, especially in moving from the Old
Testament to the New.
Stories are unified around a central
protagonist, and so is the
Bible. The characterization of God is the main concern
of the Bible,
and it is pursued from beginning to end. All other
characters and
events interact with this great Protagonist. The story
of the Bible is
the story of God's acts in history. It is the story
of salvation his-
tory-of how God entered
history to save individuals and (in the Old
Testament) to save a nation from physical and
spiritual destruction.
Stories are full of the concrete experiences of
everyday life. Sto-
rytellers are never content with
abstract propositions. Their impulse
is to show,
not merely to tell about an event.
Stories help readers re-
live an experience in the order in which the events
happened and as
vividly as possible. Stories incarnate their
meaning in concrete form.
In
the words of fiction writer Flannery O'Connor, a storyteller speaks
"with character and action, not about character and action."4
The Bible, then, should be regarded as a story
because it consists
of the very things people associate with stories.
These include plot
conflict, interaction among characters, emphasis
on human choice, a
unified and coherent pattern of events that ends
where it did not be-
gin, a central protagonist, and the incarnation of
meaning in concrete
settings, characters, and events. The narrative
quality of the Bible is
rooted in the character of God, for God is above all
the God who acts.
What are the implications of the narrative shape
of the Bible
as a whole? Primarily it gives the best possible
organizing frame-
work for individual parts of the Bible. The average layperson's
grasp of how individual parts of the Bible fit
together is almost
nonexistent. The most customary ways by which people
try to orga-
2 Amos Wilder, Early Christian Rhetoric: The Language of
the Gospel (
MA:
3 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (
1957),
p. 316.
4 Flannery O'Connor, Mastery and Manners, ed. Sally and
Robert Fitzgerald (New
134 Bibliotheca
Sacra / April-June 1990
nize the Bible are by the
categories of systematic theology and of
history. Both of these, however, have been
overrated by scholars as
organizing frameworks for the Bible as a whole. The
reason theol-
ogy does not help the
average person organize the entire Bible is
that it cuts against the grain of how the Bible
itself is structured.
The
Bible is not arranged as a topical outline.
Nor is most of the Bible organized as one
expects history to be
organized. This is not to question that the events
recorded in the Bi-
ble are historically
accurate. But these historical events are pre-
sented in narrative form, not
as the accumulation of information like
that found in modern history books. Many Old
Testament survey
courses lead the student away from the biblical
text to the constructs
of the discipline of history. Even more
emphatically, they distance
the events of the Bible, treating them as having no
relevance today.
Literary narrative, by contrast, has a universal
quality to it. It
tells not simply what happened but what happens-what
is true for
all people in all places at all times. In this
regard preachers intu-
itively tend to take a literary
approach, while academic biblical
scholars cling to the historical model. The
tendency of academic bib-
lical scholarship, as
distinct from a more devotional approach to
the Bible, has been to seal off the Bible in its
ancient setting. To
guard against possible misunderstanding, let me say
again that my
literary approach does not lead me to question
that the events
recorded in the Bible actually occurred. The
question is how one can
most profitably talk about the stories of the Bible
in preaching and
teaching. In terms of how the Bible actually
presents history, it re-
sembles the chapters in a novel
more than chapters in a history book.
Yet
it differs from a novel in being factual rather than fictional.
Methodology for
Interacting with Bible Narratives
In considering the dynamics of the individual
stories in the
Bible,
the aim is to provide a minimal grammar for handling these
stories. For those who want more detail, several
books provide good
models.5
As a backdrop, consider how stories are
typically handled from
the pulpit and in Bible studies. The unity that is
found in the pas-
sage is ordinarily a conceptual or theological
unity. Expositors ap-
5 A plausible starting
place for examples and further sources of narrative analysis
are the following books by the present writer: How to Read the Bible as Literature
(Grand
Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1984); Words
of Delight: A Literary In-
troduction to the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1987); and Words of Life:
A Literary Introduction
to the Neu, Testament (
1987).
"And It Came to Pass": The
Bible as God's Storybook 135
proach a narrative passage as
though it were an essay. That is, they
assume that the writer is presenting a thesis with
supporting evi-
dence. The sermon takes a
similar form. The expositor goes to the
story with theological or moral categories in mind
and quickly sees a
sermon outline taking shape. The resulting sermon has
a thesis and
three or four subordinate generalizations. Details in
the story are
then adduced as supporting data for the
generalizations.
All this misunderstands how stories communicate
their truth.
Storytellers
have a story to tell. They do not construct their stories
out of ideas, though ideas are indirectly embodied
in their stories.
The
basic ingredients of stories-and the corresponding terms with
which they should be discussed-are setting, characters,
and plot or
action. First on the expositor's agenda should be to
relive the story.
The
theological or moral principles should be asserted later.
Settings are the forgotten element in many
people's analysis of
stories. Yet they will repay all the attention
given them. Settings
are physical, temporal, and cultural. They serve
two main functions
in stories. They are always part of the action in
a story, providing a
fit container for the actions and characters and
allowing the story to
come alive in the reader's imagination. Often a
setting takes on
symbolic importance as well, becoming an
important part of the
meaning of a story. In the story of Lot, for
example,
monstrosity, and God's turning the city into a
wasteland is itself the
meaning of the story-God's judgment against sin.
Analyzing the
function of settings in the stories of the Bible
will almost always add
immensely to one's understanding.
Characters are the second thing to note in a
story, and here the
record of most expositors is rather good. Biblical
characters are
known in a variety of ways: by what the storyteller
says about
them, by other characters' responses to them, by
their words and
thoughts, by what they say about themselves, and
above all by
their actions. The key to interacting with the
characters in biblical
narrative is to look on them as real--life people
and therefore to get
to know them as fully as possible.
A principle of literary narrative is that
characters in a story are
in some sense universal. They are representative
of humanity gener-
ally and carry a burden of meaning larger than
themselves. On the
basis of what happened to them, Bible readers and
preachers can
generalize about people in general, including
themselves.
At the level of plot, discussions of biblical
narrative usually
show the most deficiency. To begin, stories are
built around one or
more plot conflicts. Nearly everything in stories is
slanted around
these central conflicts. The conflict can be physical
conflict, conflict
between people, or moral/spiritual conflict. A
plot conflict has a be-
ginning, a discernible development, and a final
resolution. Not to
136 Bibliotheca
Sacra / April-June 1990
approach the unity of a story in terms of plot
conflict is self-defeat-
ing. Plot conflict is
simply how most stories are constructed.
A plot is also constructed as a cause-effect
sequence in which one
event leads to the next. A story differs in this
regard from journalis-
tic reportage, where a summary of the most
important information
appears first, with other details added by a
principle of accumula-
tion. A story, by contrast,
takes us through an action in the order in
which it unfolded. This means that any successful
teaching of a bib-
lical story requires that the
action be presented in its successive
phases, observing the ongoing progression and
coherence of the action.
This
progressive unifying element is utterly lost if an expositor sim-
ply reaches into a story for details that support a
conceptual outline.
In the ongoing progression of the plot
conflicts(s), the reader goes
through the action with a central character
known as the protago-
nist. Arrayed
against him or her are the antagonists. Viewing the
action from this perspective gives the analysis a
focus that it other-
wise lacks. Common narrative strategies are to show
the protagonist
in situations of testing and situations that
require choice. A discrep-
ancy between what readers
know to be true and ignorance on the part
of characters in a story is known as irony.
Having interacted with the story in the terms
noted, an exposi-
tor must move from story to
meaning. Since stories embody their
meanings indirectly, this requires active
interpretation. It is useful
to divide the interpretive process into two phases.
The first is to de-
termine what the story is
about, and the second is to identify what
the story says about that experience or topic. A
simple rule of inter-
pretation is to assume that every
story is in some sense an example
story and therefore to ask what the story is an
example of. The nar-
rative world that a
storyteller creates by his or her selectivity of
details is a picture of the world as the writer
understands it, and of
what is right and wrong in that world. It should
also be remembered
that storytelling is an affective art. That is, a
story conveys much of
its meaning by getting a reader to feel positively
or negatively to-
ward characters and events.
Listening to sermons, surveying Bible study
materials, and even
reading specialized literary commentary have
demonstrated over
and over how rarely people use foundational
narrative concepts
when analyzing the stories of the Bible. One cannot
relive a biblical
story without employing the standard tools of
narrative analysis.
The practical application of all this is that
the exposition of
the stories of the Bible needs to be informed by
literary analysis.
People
need to hear more about plot conflict and characterization
and the function of settings in a story than they
customarily hear.
They
need to see stories laid out into their successive episodes or
dramatic scenes. They need to see the unity of
stories identified in
"And It Came to Pass": The
Bible as God's Storybook 137
such narrative terms as testing and choice and
initiation and quest.
They
need to see theological statements arise from the analysis of
stories instead of being imposed on them. And
they need to see theo-
logical meanings derived from stories as a whole
instead of the usual
practice of moralizing about the specific details
in a story.
Nothing has been said this far in this article
about such matters
as narrator, implied author, implied audience, the
narrator's point
of view, signifier, actant,
sender, receiver, and similar terms that
fall into an approach that can loosely be called the
rhetorical ap-
proach to biblical narrative.
Such concepts have little use.
Specialized literary analysis of biblical
narrative is currently
governed by the myth of complexity. It assumes
that the stories of
the Bible are enormously complex and are best
discussed by critical
tools that are extremely detailed. Such a myth of
complexity, how-
ever, is to be rejected. The literature of the Bible
is subtle and artis-
tically crafted but essentially
simple. It is folk literature with oral
roots. Talking about the Bible's literature does not
require intricate
tools and theories. It does, however, require
literary tools.
Distinctive Features
of Biblical Narrative
The preceding pages have explored the dynamics
of biblical
narrative and in effect have discussed what the
stories of the Bible
share with stories in general. This should be
balanced with a discus-
sion of some things that are
distinctive to biblical narrative. The
territory about to be covered is essential to
understanding biblical
narrative but no more essential than what has
already been said.
This
statement intends to counter the widespread false assumption
that the Bible is somehow better and truer when it
differs from sto-
ries generally. Its validity
is often wrongly made to depend on its
uniqueness. People would get more out of the Bible
and handle it bet-
ter as teachers and
preachers if they would carry over to the reading
of the Bible more of what they know about other
books.
The most distinctive feature of biblical
narrative is the mingling
of three impulses or modes. They are the
historical, the theological,
and the literary (the impulse to embody human
experience in an ar-
tistic form). Usually one of
these dominates a passage, though not to
the exclusion of the others. The more literary the
treatment of an
event is, the more a literary approach will yield.
But even in these
cases the stories of the Bible invite historical and
theological ap-
proaches as well as a literary
approach in a way that stories in gen-
eral do not. Obviously then
the plea for literary criticism of biblical
narrative does not imply the sufficiency of such
an approach by itself.
From the time that Erich Auerbach
wrote his classic comparison
of storytelling technique in Homer and in Genesis,
it has been a com-
138 Bibliotheca
Sacra / April-June 1990
monplace in literary criticism
that the stories of the Bible are told
in a spare, unembellished style.6 To
quote Auerbach's well-known
summary, biblical narrative includes
the externalization of only
so much of the phenomena as is necessary
for the purpose of the
narrative, all else left in obscurity, the decisive
points of the narrative alone
are emphasized, what lies between is
nonexistent; thoughts and feelings
remain unexpressed, are only sug-
gested by the silence and the
fragmentary speeches; the whole, per-
meated with the most
unrelieved suspense ... remains mysterious and
"fraught with
background.”7
The
effect of this unembellished storytelling technique is that the
stories "require subtle investigation and
interpretation."8 With so
few details included, readers need to get maximum
mileage out of ev-
erything the writer puts before
them.
Clarity and mystery thus mingle as one moves through these sto-
ries. For the most part the
storytellers of the Bible narrate but do not
explain what happened. Rarely do they add
explicit commentary to
their presentation. What they tell is reliable, but
they leave much
unsaid. In the formula of one literary scholar, when
the storytellers
of the Bible add explanation to their
presentation, they tell the
truth, but not necessarily the whole truth about an
event or charac-
ter.9 The result is that it
is easy to grasp the basic action in a bibli-
cal story, but difficult to interpret all of its
meaning or human dy-
namics.
The fact that biblical narrative requires an
abundance of active
interpretation becomes clearer when
one observes the way in which
dramatized scenes are usually the central element
in a Bible story.
Storytellers
can use as many as four different modes. In direct
narra-
tive they simply report
events, telling in their own voice what hap-
pened. In dramatic narrative they dramatize a
scene as though it
were in a play, quoting the speeches or dialogue of
characters. In de-
scription writers
describe the details of setting or character, while
commentary consists
of explanations by storytellers. Overwhelm-
ingly, biblical stories
emphasize the dramatized scene. Biblical
imagination is strongly dramatic. Drama, in turn, is
the most objec-
tive of literary genres. It
simply presents characters and leaves it up
to the audience to come to the right conclusions.
Once again the sto-
ries of the Bible call for
interpretation.
6 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The
Representation of Reality in Western Literature,
trans. Willard R. Trask
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 3-23.
7 Ibid., pp. 11-12.
8 Ibid., p. 15.
9 Meier Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (
University
Press, 1985), p. 43.
"And It Came to Pass": The
Bible as God's Storybook 139
This effect is reinforced by the prevailing
brevity of the narra-
tive units. This preference
for the brief unit is characteristic of other
biblical genres as well. It means that extended
delineation of per-
sonality is not included in
biblical narrative, though a composite
portrait may be produced by combining the
fragments. In reading,
"the great figures move in somewhat remote fashion, their charac-
ters illuminated as it were
from the side by flashes of magnanimity,
pity, anger; heroism, deceit, covetousness;
suffering and the frequent
cry of despair."10
The stories of the Bible also combine two types
of narrative
often thought of as opposites. One is the impulse
toward realism.
The
stories of the Bible are rooted in actual history. They often in-
clude passages that read more
like diaries or journalistic reports
than ordinary stories. They tell about the failings
of characters as
well as their virtues. They also focus on common
experience and
characters of average social standing in a way that
other ancient
literature does not.
But the stories of the Bible also possess the
qualities of a type of
story that is in many ways the exact opposite of
realism and that
literary scholars call romance. This is the type
of story that de-
lights in the extraordinary and miraculous. Such
stories are filled
with mystery, the supernatural, and the heroic. They
are replete
with adventure, battle, capture and rescue,
surprise, the exotic and
marvelous, poetic justice (good characters
rewarded and bad ones
punished), and happy endings in which the
underdog wins, the vil-
lain gets just punishment, the slave girl marries
the king, the dead
come back to life. It is no wonder that the stories of
the Bible appeal
to children. Nor is it surprising that they merge
in a child's imagi-
nation with romance stories. I recall an occasion when
my daughter,
then age five, recommended I select for a Bible
study "the story of
Gideon, and his knights, and their fiery
swords."
The stories of the Bible thus combine the two
tendencies of nar-
rative that have most appealed
to the human race. They are factu-
ally realistic and romantically marvelous. They
bring together two
impulses that the human race is always trying to
join-reason and
imagination, fact and mystery. The stories of the
Bible appeal to
that part of humanity that is firmly planted on the
earth and to
that part of humanity that soars to the heavens.
Another fusion of polarities occurs with the way
in which the
stories of the Bible call for both a naive and a
sophisticated literary
response. They are both adult stories and
children's stories. On one
10 T. R. Henn, The Bible as Literature (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1979), p.
31.
140 Bibliotheca
Sacra / April-June 1990
side they are "folk" stories-brief,
realistic, vivid, uncomplicated in
plot line. They are stories that elicit intuitive
responses from chil-
dren. Looking back, I find
that my childhood responses to such things
as dramatic irony or poetic justice or
characterization were usually
the right ones, even though I lacked the literary
terminology to
name them.
But the stories of the Bible also call for a
sophisticated re-
sponse. Part of this is the
ability to deal with what are today
called adult themes-violence, sex, deceit, death, the
subtleties of
tension in personal relations, and the ambiguous
mixture of good and
evil in people's character and actions. Bible
stories often carry a sur-
face meaning that no one can miss, combined with
difficult issues
that require interpretive skill to notice and
unravel. In a sense the
Bible
is ready to meet its readers, whether children or adults, at
whatever level their own background of experience
and literary
ability allows them to meet it. This is true not
only of the content of
Bible
stories but also of their artistry. For people whose literary ca-
pacity has been awakened,
there is as much excellence of literary
technique to relish in the stories of the Bible as
in other literature.
Some additional distinctives
of biblical narrative may be noted.
Patterns
of repetition are numerous and intricate.11 Irony is a leading
ingredient.12 Physical descriptions
of characters are understated and
sparse. Biblical storytellers frequently work with
elemental di-
chotomies such as good and evil,
light and darkness, God and people,
the earthly and the heavenly or spiritual. The
simplicity of these
stories is paradoxically also majestic. Most
distinctive of all is the
regularity with which God is a character in the
stories.
If the stories of the Bible are like other
stories, they are also
different from them. Even at a literary level,
readers of the Bible
are continuously aware that this is a special book.
If it reenacts fa-
miliar narrative conventions,
it also transcends them and sometimes
refutes them.
The Narrative Quality
of Christian Life and Doctrine
The high proportion of stories in the Bible
suggests that narra-
tive is inherent in the
Christian faith itself. Wilder once wrote
11 Patterns of repetition
in biblical narrative have become a prominent topic in recent
criticism. Specimen studies include Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New
(Jerusalem:
Magnes Press, 1978), pp. 24-50.
12 Two superb studies of
irony in biblical narrative are those by Edwin M. Good, Irony
in the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965), and
Paul D. Duke,
Irony in the Fourth
Gospel
(Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985).
"And It Came to Pass": The
Bible as God's Storybook 141
that "the narrative mode is uniquely important
in Christianity....
A
Christian can confess his faith where he is ... by telling a story or
a series of stories."13 If a believer wants to tell
about his own Chris-
tian faith, he has to tell a
story about how his faith began, where
it