How To Look at the Bible as Literature

We've all been reading Plotz (except for those of us who received Gomez) and while it's an entertaining read nothing along the lines of knowledge, at least of any depth, can be gained from him. He is merely an outline of the common misconception of how the bible should be read. He is a good "bad" example of the ways in which our conception of how things are supposed to be shape the way things were. More to the point, Plotz reads the bible how a history book now would be written to be read.

The bible is a book from which most (if not all) of the types of readings we have around today have sprouted. We have genealogies, Histories, Rhyme and Verse, Narratives, Parables, etc, etc, all as one.

Now some of you may be asking why we haven't made the bible more coherent and the fact is the problem is not with the bible but with ourselves. A good mind changes a text so as to be understood by everyone. A great mind changes itself to understand all the types of texts.

The mysterious mental maneuver we need to take in order to read the bible correctly is placed in Northwrop Frye's introduction on page xii and it is about the most dense introduction, let alone writing, I've come across.

Frye's critical position "revolves around the identity of mythology and literature, and the way in which the structures of myth, along with those of folktale, legend, and related genres, continue to form the structures of literature."-xii

He generalizes his thesis with this "central" point: " every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature. Comparative mythology is a fascinating subject, but it is quickly exhausted as a scholarly study if it remains simply a configuration of patterns. It is generally understood that it needs to be grounded in psychology or anthropology: it is much less understood that its central and most important extension is into the literature (along with the criticism of literature) which incarnates a mythology in historical context. In the opposite direction, a literary criticism that cuts off its own cultural and historical roots in mythology becomes sterile even more quickly. Some forms of it stop with an analytic disintegrating of texts as an end in itself; others study literature as a historical or ideological phenomenon, and its works as documents illustrating something outside literature. But this leaves out the central structural principles that literature derives from myth, the principles that give literature its communicating power across the centuries through all ideological changes. Such structural principles are certainly conditioned by social and historical factors and do not transcend them, but they retain a continuity of from that points to an identity of the literary organism distinct from all its adaptation to its social environment."-xiii

NOW THAT IS DENSE.

But it's also packed with knowledge.

(I will be, shortly, changing this into dot notes of how I should and should not read the bible and will be sharing it on my blog with whoever would like to read it as soon as my decoding is finished.)