I grew up in the Canadian province of Alberta. Now: if someone were to ask me, “What is Alberta like?” there are, obviously, many ways I could answer that question.
I could refer them to one of the many history books written about Alberta. Or, I could give them an AMA Travel Guide to the province. I could give them Thomas King’s classic novel Green Grass Running Water, which is about the Native American experience of colonialism and is set in Alberta. Or I could sing them Ian Tyson’s famous song called “Four Strong Winds.”
In literary terms, we call the different forms of these various texts—a history book, a novel, a poem and so on—we call them genres. And we intuitively recognize that in order to make proper use of a text, we need to take its genre into consideration.
For instance, Green Grass Running Water wouldn’t be all that useful if I simply wanted to find my way from Calgary to Edmonton. But then, if I wanted to reminisce about my childhood in Alberta, it’s not likely I’d turn to the AMA Tour Book. “Four Strong Winds” might help with that, but then, just because the song has a line in there about how “the weather’s good there in the fall,” doesn’t mean I should use it to help me plan my next vacation to Alberta.
Perhaps this all goes without saying, but the genre of a piece of writing naturally determines how you interpret it. And at the same time, if you want a complete picture of something, it’s helpful to have a variety of genres to draw from. You’ll get a fuller picture of Alberta if you include “Four Strong Winds” and Green Grass Running Water, than if you simply read “The History of Alberta.”
All that may seem obvious, but, for some reason, it’s often overlooked when it comes to the Bible.
Because, while it’s often recognized that the Bible is a collection of different books, written over the course of thousands of years by many different authors, it’s less often recognized that the Bible is also a collection of different kinds of books: books of prophecy, books of history, books of poetry, stories and genealogies and personal letters and so on.
And just like a whole bunch of different kinds of writing help us better answer the question, What is Alberta like? The Bible’s range of genres—from prayers to temple inventories—are all included to help us better answer the question, What is God like?
Hermeneutics is the fancy word theologians sometimes use to describe “the art of interpreting the Bible.” And the point is: recognizing and understanding the particular genre of any given Bible passage is an essential part of good hermeneutics.
For example, in debates about whether evolution is true or whether God created the world in six literal days, neither side usually mentions the fact that the creation account in Genesis is a very specific genre of writing—an Ancient Middle Eastern Cosmology, that is—which was written to answer specific questions for a specific reason, and we ought to keep the specific conventions of this genre in mind as we interpret it.
As another example, there are popular interpretations of the Book of Revelation—the last book of the Bible—that try to line up modern day political events with its strange dreams and visions. Many of these interpretations get extremely elaborate and detailed, but they seldom acknowledge that the Book of Revelation is a very particular kind of writing—what we call an Apocalypse—with specific literary conventions that should guide how we interpret it.
Reading Revelation as though it were a modern political commentary is sort of like trying to find your way to Edmonton using only “Four Strong Winds” as your guide.
While this may seem overly complicated to some, and just plain common sense to others, understanding and considering the specific genre of any given part of the Bible is crucial if we want to be what the Bible itself encourages us to be: “Approved workers, who correctly handle the Word of Truth.”
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