Bible as Literature

Professors do not really teach the 'Bible as Literature' when most of the time is spent on questions of documents and authorship. Literature is known only when one appreciates those qualities which give to the writings enduring vitality. The purpose of the following pages is to point out the sources of power, the secret of the enchantment of the English Bible; to show how the miracle happened, and to feel the wonder of it.

Gabriel Josipovici, in his The Book of God, which is a kind of long and bold meditation on the status of the Bible as literature and its relation to later ideas of literature, aptly proposes that the Bible stands with a whole family of literary texts that seek - fiercely and in the end futilely - to transcend their own status as literature through necessarily literary means. Among writers of our own century, he mentions Proust, Kafka, Beckett, and Celan as figures who share with the creators of the Bible an aspiration to "produce something which is other than literature, something essentially truer and more necessary than literature could ever be."

According to one common line of thought, the Hebrew Bible exhibits certain literary embellishments and literary interludes, but those who would present "the Bible as literature" must turn it around to an odd angle from its own original emphases, which are theological, legislative, historiographic, and moral. This opposition between literature and the really serious things collapses the moment we realize that it is the exception in any culture for literary invention to be a purely aesthetic activity.

Those who view the Bible as literature in conventional terms have quietly ignored these materials as unfortunate encumbrances, while most modern historical scholarship has seen in them either an inscrutable ancient impulse to cherish traditions for their own sake or an effort to provide quasi-documentary authentication for political realities of the later biblical period. As a result, the sundry lists have been analyzed by scholars chiefly for whatever hints of long-lost history they might preserve in fossilized form or for whatever oblique reflections they might offer of the situation of the later writers and redactors.

Martin Luther loved the Scriptures, especially the Psalms, and this love had in it a degree of explicit literary appreciation not found in English writers of the time. His 'Preface to the Psalms' is full of literary as well as religious praise, and he even writes of them as having 'more eloquence than that possessed by Cicero or the greatest of the orators'. This is enough to suggest a very different temper from the English in German ideas of the Bible as literature. Nevertheless, he conceived of the language of the Bible, particularly the OT Hebrew, as simple and lowly, so unliterary in fact that it is capable of giving offence. His conclusion is, 'simple and lowly are these swaddling clothes, but dear is the treasure, Christ, who lies in them'.

When later critics, in the thoroughness of their literary reverence, put forward the idea that the KJB had always been greatly admired, they did so without evidence. The seventeenth century did admire the Bible as literature, but one has to be precise: it admired either the actual or the imagined originals, not the translations.