Is the Bible literature?

The question of the significance of the study of scripture as literature has been discussed a bit  on the blogernacle lately, and I’d like to offer a couple more thoughts on the subject.  The term literature derives from the Latin littera, meaning technically, a “letter of the alphabet,” but more generally “things composed of letters,” or simply written texts.  (We sometimes still use the term “letters” in the academy to refer to literature, drama, poetry, etc.)  At that level of meaning, of course, the Bible is clearly literature.

In modern usage, however, literature is generally understood as fiction–novels, stories, drama, poetry, etc.  When someone says “I’m studying literature,” they don’t usually mean they are studying history, philosophy, religion, or any other text-based discipline.  As one standard text book on the subject puts it:

“What does it mean to read the Bible ‘as literature’?  Primarily that for the time being one looks at the Bible in the same way that one would look at any other book: as a product of the human mind.”  (J. Babel, C. Wheeler, and A. York, The Bible As Literature, 5th ed, (Oxford, 2005); I quote from the third edition, p. 3)

While I don’t disagree that the Bible (or other scripture) can be seen as a “product of the human mind,” this formulation begs the real question: is it only the “product of the human mind”?  Is there anything at all divine about the text?

Robert Alter, perhaps the greatest literary scholar of the Bible, puts it this way, when describing narrative in the Bible.

• “I would contend that prose fiction is the best general rubric for describing biblical narrative.  Or, to be more precise, … we can speak of the Bible as historicized prose fiction.” (Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, (Basic, 1981), 25)

• “The point is that fiction was the principal means which the biblical authors had at their disposal for realizing history.  Under scrutiny, biblical narrative generally proves to be either fiction … or history given the imaginative definition of fiction.” (Alter, 32)

• “The author of the David stories stands in basically the same relation to Israelite history as Shakespeare stands to English history in his history plays.” (Alter, 35)

Or, to give an ancient example, the Bible bears the same relationship to history that Pseudo-Callisthenes’ fictional Alexander Romance bears to the historical biographies of Alexander by Arrian, Plutarch, and Curtius.

Thus, while everyone can agree that the Bible is literature in the sense that it is a written text, studying the Bible as literature in the modern academy generally means studying the Bible precisely as one would study fiction.  The point behind all of this is, of course, that this is precisely what such authors really think about the Bible.  They are not just treating it as fiction.  To them, at its core, it is fiction, and can thus best be studied and understood as literature rather than as history.  If they are right in this assumption, then approaching the Bible in this way in fact makes perfect sense, and should, indeed, be the preferred way of approaching the text.  For such an approach, the fact that the Bible came to be accepted as scripture by Jews and Christians is an interesting historical fact, but this should not distract us from studying the Bible for what it really is: literary fiction.

What do people actually examine when they study the Bible as literature?  They look at topics such as: type-scenes, language, aesthetics, literary techniques, repetition, irony, reticence, narration, character development, hyperbole, metaphor, symbolism, allegory, personification, wordplay, and poetry.  Just to be clear, I’m not really objecting to any of this.  The Bible does contain all of these literary phenomena and more.  We can indeed understand the Bible more deeply and more richly when we understand these things.  But is that what the Bible is really all about?  Are these things why the Bible is important?   Do people really read the Bible because it has intriguing type-scenes and some really funky irony?  Or should we be interested in type-scenes and irony because it helps us better understand the Bible as scripture.

There are many aspects to biblical studies: linguistics, geography, history, archaeology, ritual, literature, epigraphy, numismatics, anthropology, paleobotany, military, etc.  I’ve actually studied them all to some degree–except maybe paleobotany.  I believe each of these approaches can enrich our understanding of the Bible, as long as they don’t distract us from what is really important.  If the Bible is not scripture, the fact that it may be pretty good fiction–not as good as Homer, or Dante, or Shakespeare, or Milton, of course–is really not going rescue the text from the cultural graveyard of boring books by old dead white men.