Literary Context

One of the most common mistakes I see when it comes to misunderstanding a particular Biblical passage comes down to a misunderstanding of its context.  While there are many categories of context, one that is often forgotten is literary context – that is, understanding the type of literature in question.

The arrangement and ordering of the Bible is not specifically chronological, but is rather categorized by literature types:

• Torah/Law/Pentateuch (Genesis through Deuteronomy)
• History (Joshua through Esther)
• Poetry (Job through Song of Solomon)
• Major/Minor Prophets (Isaiah through Malachi)
• Gospels/Theological Narrative (Matthew through John)
• History (Acts)
• Epistles (Romans through Jude)
• Prophecy (Revelation)

It is important to recognize the type of literature we are reading and to interact with it accordingly.  Philip Yancy shares an excellent personal example in his book The Bible Jesus Read:

Psalms belong as a part of God’s Word, but in the same way Job or Ecclesiastes belongs.  We read the speeches of Job’s friends – accurate records of misguided thinking – in a different way than we read the Sermon on the Mount.  “The psalms do not theologize,” writes Kathleen Norris in The Cloister Walk, “One reason for this is that the psalms are poetry, and poetry’s function is not to explain but to offer images and stories that resonate with our lives.”

Understanding this distinction changed the way I read Psalms.  Formerly, I had approached this book as a graduate student might approach a textbook: I skimmed the poetry in search of correct and important concepts to be noted and neatly classified.  Psalms resists such systematization and will, I think, drive mad anyone who tries to wrest from it a rigid organizational schema.

We could look at additional examples, of course, but the simple concept is that different types of literature are meant to influence us differently.  In the same way, we ought to approach different types of literature with unique and specific goals.  I wouldn’t critique poetry as a historical narrative.  Neither would I expect a theological narrative to read like a prophetic book.  There will be consistent threads in regards to content, of course, but nearly everything else would be different and unique.  For example, I might pick up on something of the nature of the Kingdom of God in the Psalms, and I might find direct teaching about the Kingdom of God in the gospels, and then I might see examples of historical figures living and advancing the Kingdom of God in the historical book of Acts.  In each case the Kingdom of God is the common theme, but gain something unique and different in each case which produces a broader and more full understanding of the one concept than we could get from just a single type of literature.