What's in a Story?

One of the most impactful elements of biblical study is the discernment of literary genres, or types. This is based on the realization that the Bible reflects everyday life, communicating its message in various ways. Guided by the Spirit and their tastes and skills, the authors of the Scriptures chose differing methods to relate God's message to His people. Some shared history through carefully constructed stories of people and events, while others wrote specific instructions and teachings through letters. Still others skillfully stirred up emotional responses of worship and prayer through artistic psalms and poetry. 

Such variety in the Scriptures should neither surprise us nor concern us. The men God used to write His Word came from all walks of life - scholars and fishermen, shepherds and kings, physicians and warriors. These authors would have written in ways their experience, skill,  and personality led them to write. The mosaic of styles constructed with these combined writings makes the Bible so beautiful and powerful, capable of instructing our minds and stirring our hearts.

However, while this wide diversity of literary forms is a blessing to treasure, it brings a word of caution. Simply put, we cannot study all the Scriptures identically. We cannot expect for example, that the psalms will convey truth in the same way that the epistles do To study God's Word well, we need to be able to identify the basic types of literary genre and be familiar with how these genres impact the way the message is organized (structured) and the sense in which it is to be understood (whether more literal or more figurative). Missing this critical point could have us on the wrong path for interpretation.

In our training workshops, we frequently see the enormous importance of this principle in one of our earliest studies -- the book of Jonah.  Generally, before we explore the dynamics of how a biblical story functions and how it conveys its message, most of the participants see the focus of the book of Jonah as being upon either Jonah's disobedience or the repentance of the people of Nineveh, it is not until we explore the development of the main characters, the dialogue between them, and the unfolding of the plot that they recognize the focus is upon Jonah's hypocrisy toward God’s mercy and His sovereignty over when and to whom He will display it.  While the other themes are undoubtedly important, the book's prophetic rebuke toward the people of God in Jonah's day will be missed if we fail to understand how a story communicates.

So, as students and communicators of God’s Word, we must always recall that we are not free to choose the message of a passage based on our presuppositions or our taste. Instead, we must strive to discover God's message through the author. To do that well, we need to discern the basic genre the author chose and understand how it communicates its message.