In Reading the Bible: A Literary Guide to Scripture, Dr. Bill Creasy leads you on an unforgettable adventure book-by-book, Genesis through Revelation. Stemming from his popular course at UCLA, The English Bible as Literature, this work delves deeply into the text of the Bible, unveiling its rich literary genres and ancient Near Eastern origins.
Reading the Bible as literature is within every reader's ability. Because most evangelicals pay scant attention to the literary nature of the Bible, the misconception gets perpetuated that the literary approach is specialized and technical. How to Read the Bible as Literature takes you through the various literary forms used by the biblical authors.
This book will help you read the Bible with renewed appreciation and excitement and gain a more profound grasp of its truths. What I have found, however, is that reading the Bible as literature actually elevates the Bible, not diminishes it. When we read and analyze literature like War and Peace or The Bluest Eye,we account for each piece of the composition: vocabulary, tone, setting, mood, authorial voice, genre, symbols, and character development.
The Bible is one of the most published books in human history. It is also one of the most misquoted, misunderstood and misused books in human history. This happens because people are not always aware that the Bible is not a book, it is a collection of diverse writings.
The Bible might even be called an anthology, and it will include everything from poetry to genealogy, pithy sayings to. The first reason to read and interpret the Bible as literature is thus that the Bible requires it by virtue of being a literary book. A story is a story and needs to be assimilated as such.
The goal of Bible reading is to experience a passage as fully as possible. The preponderance of literary writing in the Bible shows that God trusted literature as a medium for conveying truth, and it should serve as a curb against excessive reliance on abstractly theological passages in Bible teaching and preaching. Reading the Bible as Literature: a Journey by Jody L Ondich is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
What Traits Make a Bible Passage Literature? The necessary starting point for studying the Bible as literature is to know what literature is. The purpose of this lesson is to define literature and delineate what these traits require of us as readers. This lesson may be too dificult for a high school student in the form presented here.