Bible

V

Importance and Influence

The importance and influence of the Bible among Christians and Jews may be explained broadly in both external and internal terms. The external explanation is the power of tradition, custom, and creed: religious groups confess that they are guided by the Bible. In one sense the religious community is the author of Scripture, having developed it, cherished it, used it, and eventually canonized it (that is, developed lists of officially recognized biblical books). The internal explanation, however, is what many Christians and Jews continue to experience as the power of the contents of the biblical books themselves. Ancient Israel and the early Church knew of many more religious books than the ones that constitute the Bible. The biblical books, however, were cherished and used because of what they said and how they said it; they were officially canonized because they had come to be used and believed so widely. The Bible truly is the foundation document of Judaism and Christianity.

It is commonly known that the Bible, in its hundreds of different translations, is the most widely distributed book in human history. Moreover, in all its forms, the Bible has been enormously influential and not only among the religious communities that hold it sacred. The literature, art, and music of Western culture in particular are deeply indebted to biblical themes, motifs, and images. Translations of the Bible, such as the Authorized Version (or King James Version, 1611) and Martin Luther's translation of the Bible into German (first completed in 1534), not only influenced literature but also shaped the development of languages. Such effects continue to be felt in emerging nations, where translations of the Bible into the vernacular help to shape linguistic traditions.

VI

The Old Testament

It is remarkable that Christianity includes within its Bible the entire scriptures of another religion, Judaism. The term Old Testament (from the Latin word for “covenant”) came to be applied to those Scriptures on the basis of the writings of Paul and other early Christians who distinguished between the “Old Covenant” that God made with Israel and the “New Covenant” established through Jesus Christ (see, for example, Hebrews 8:7). Because the early Church believed in the continuity of history and of divine activity, it included in the Christian Bible the written records of both the Old and the New Covenants.

A

Old Testament Literature

The Old Testament may be viewed from many different perspectives. From the viewpoint of literature, the Old Testament—indeed, the entire Bible—is an anthology, a collection of many different books. The Old Testament is by no means a unified book in terms of authorship, date of composition, or literary type; it is instead a veritable library.

Generally speaking, the books of the Old Testament and their component parts may be identified as narratives, poetic works, prophetic works, law, or apocalypses. Most of these are broad categories that include various distinct types or genres of literature and oral tradition. None of these categories is limited to the Old Testament; all are found in other ancient literature, especially that of the Near East. It is noteworthy, however, that certain types did not find their way into the Old Testament. Letters, or epistles, so important in the New Testament, are not found as separate books (except for the Letter of Jeremiah in some manuscript traditions). Autobiography, drama, and satire are not found at all. It is particularly striking that most Old Testament books contain several literary genres. Exodus, for example, contains narrative, laws, and poetry; most prophetic books include narratives and poetry in addition to prophetic genres as such.

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1

Narratives

In both outline and content, a great many Old Testament books are narratives; that is, they report the events of the past. If they have, as most do, a plot (or at least the development of tension and its resolution), characterization of the participants, and a description of the setting where the events occurred, then they are stories. On the other hand, a great many narrative works of the Old Testament are histories—although they would not fit a scholarly definition of the term. A history is a written narrative of the past that is guided by the facts, as far as the writer can determine and interpret them, and not by some aesthetic, religious, or other consideration. The historical narratives of the Old Testament are popular rather than critical works, because the writers often used oral traditions, some of them unreliable, to write their accounts. Moreover, all these narratives were written for a religious purpose; they may therefore be called salvation histories, because they are concerned with showing how God was active in human events. Examples of such works are the Deuteronomistic History (Deuteronomy through 2 Kings; see below), the Tetrateuch (Genesis through Numbers), and the Chronicler's History (1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah). The so-called Throne Succession History of David (see 2 Samuel 9-20, 1 Kings 1-2) comes closer to the modern understanding of history than does any other biblical narrative. The writer was sensitive to the details of historical events and characters, and he interpreted the course of affairs in the light of human motivations. Nonetheless, he could see the hand of God moving behind the scenes.

Other narrative books are Ruth, a short story; Jonah, a didactic, or teaching, story; and Esther, a historical romance or a festival legend. It is likely that such books developed from folktales or legends. Several didactic stories are found in the deuterocanonical books of the Bible and in the Apocrypha: Tobit, Judith, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon.

Many of these and other narrative genres are found within the books of the Old Testament. The Book of Genesis is composed, as are most of the other narrative works, of numerous individual stories, most of which originally circulated independently and orally. The patriarchal stories in Genesis 11-50 have been called legends, sagas, and—more accurately—family stories. Many of them are aetiological; that is, they explain some place, practice, or name in terms of its origin.

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2

Poetic Works

The poetic books of the Old Testament may be taken to include Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon (Songs), and in the deuterocanonical books and the Apocrypha, Sirach and the Prayer of Manasseh. The Book of Wisdom has much in common with the poetic wisdom books, but it is not poetry. Most of the prophetic books are written in Hebrew poetry, but they are sufficiently distinctive to be considered separately.

Hebrew poetry has two major characteristics, one relatively easy to recognize even in translation and the other difficult to discern. The more obvious characteristic is the use of parallelismus membrorum, or parallelism of lines or other parts. For example, the meaning of one line may be restated or paralleled by a second line, as in Psalms 6:1:

These two lines are synonymous. On the other hand, the second line in the unit may state the negative side of the first line's point, as in Proverbs 15:1:

A soft answer turns away wrath,
but a harsh word stirs up anger.

In other cases, the second line may extend or explain the first, and in still others, the parallelism is merely formal. Parallelism can in some instances extend to three or more lines. One major advantage of most modern English translations of the Bible is that they retain the poetic form of the Hebrew, enabling the reader to enjoy and understand the structure of the original.

The other major feature of Hebrew poetry is rhythm, which seems to have been based on the number of accents in each line. One of the more easily recognized metres is that of the qina, or dirge, in which the first line has three beats or accented syllables and the second line has two.

The poetic books include a great many diverse genres. The most widespread types are the various songs of worship (Psalms) and wisdom poetry. In addition, the Bible contains one book of love poetry, the Song of Solomon (Songs).

Israel's worship literature was lyrical poetry, that is, poetry meant to be sung. Most, but not all, of these songs are collected in the books of Psalms. Many are hymns—songs in praise of God himself, his works on behalf of Israel, or his creation. Others are communal laments or complaint songs, which were, in effect, prayers of petition sung by the people when they were faced with trouble. Approximately one-third of the Psalms are individual laments or complaints, songs used by or on behalf of individuals facing death or disaster. When the nation or the individual has been saved from trouble, thanksgiving songs would be sung. A few Psalms, such as 2, 45, and 110, celebrate the coronation of a king in Israel as God's special servant.

The wisdom poetry includes collections of wisdom sayings and short poems, as in the Book of Proverbs, and long compositions such as Job, Ecclesiastes, and Sirach. The shorter wisdom materials are proverbs, sayings, and admonitions, commonly only two lines long. Some were undoubtedly traditional or popular sayings; others bear the marks of thoughtful and creative composition. Proverbs 1-9 contains a collection of poems on the nature of wisdom itself, but the Book of Job is a lengthy poetic composition in the form of a dialogue framed by a folk tale. Ecclesiastes is a somewhat disjointed work; Sirach is a book written by a Jewish teacher and later translated by his grandson.

The subject matter of the wisdom sayings ranges from practical advice for living a good and successful life to reflections on the relationship between following the wise path and obedience to the divinely revealed law. Job, at least on one level, agonizes over the question of the suffering of the righteous, and Ecclesiastes meditates sadly on the meaning of life in the face of death.