Practice on Your Own
Reading the bible as literature is not conceptually difficult. Anyone can do it, but it does take some practice. A bad habit we need to break ourselves of is speed-reading. Modern readers like to skim things today because we don’t have a lot of time, and we want to get to the point quickly. We need to slow things down a bit and try reading the bible more closely. Don’t just let your eyes glide over a page of text, but pay attention to each verse. Then pay attention to words that jump out at you as significant or interesting. Remember, biblical authors took special care with the words they chose since they didn’t want to waste their expensive writing materials on unimportant stuff. Oftentimes we catch things the second, third, or fourth time we read something – things that didn’t catch our eye earlier. It also helps to read the same passage in a different format, like reading a passage in your own bible and then reading it in another bible or online, forcing our eyes to see the same material in a different way. Or read a passage and then come back to it again the next day or the next week. Frequently we see something differently when we return to it with refreshed eyes.
Also pay attention to some of the techniques outlined above. Some are easier to spot than others, like repetition. Some require a bit more expertise, like intertextuality, but most bibles today give you the tools to study this technique. Your bible probably has cross-referencing on each page, probably in the footnotes or on the side of each page. If you’re curious about a specific verse or passage, see what other passages might be connected to it (as indicated by the cross-references) and then read the other passage(s) to see how they’re related. For example, Jesus utters a bitter cry from the cross in Mark 15:34: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It sounds like Jesus has given up hope and feels abandoned by his Father, but look at the notes about cross-references. Jesus is quoting the first line of Psalm 22. If you go back to the Old Testament and read this psalm, you’ll see that the speaker begins in sorrow but ends in joy. He cries out to God in his anguish for several stanzas, but toward the end of the psalm, he speaks about how he will praise the Lord and is confident that the Lord will come to his aid. In the same way, Jesus can express his despair and agony while dying on the cross but like the psalmist, he knows God is watching over him, and he will proclaim the Lord and sing his praises too.
Cross-references can help us see connections between different books of the bible, but you don’t need any assistance seeing connections within a story or book. Always be mindful of context since passages are not isolated islands out in a vast sea but like various towns and cities along a major highway that are all connected. Reading individual passages is perfectly fine, but it’s better if you try reading a book of the bible in sequence. You can spread this reading out over many days and weeks, but try to keep in mind what’s happening in the larger narrative so you can see how all the pieces fit together. For example, the different scenes featuring the beloved disciple in the Gospel of John are unusual by themselves but make a lot more sense when you connect them together by reading the whole gospel, discovering at the end that this character provides a model of true discipleship for us.
Finally, for more advanced techniques of biblical story-telling, you could consult a few books written by scholars for a general audience. For the Old Testament, take a look at Jerome Walsh’s Old Testament Narrative: A Guide to Interpretation. It covers several of the techniques described here but in more detail as well as several others not mentioned. It also can help with reading the New Testament since many of the techniques used by Old Testament writers were employed by their New Testament colleagues as well. For an in-depth approach to reading the gospels as literature, check out Mark as Story by David Rhoads, Joanna Dewey, and Donald Michie. They take you step by step through the gospel of Mark, showing readers what they’ll discover when they read the gospel as literature. Some features are straightforward and might even be ones you’re already recognized on your own, but others will surprise you. For example, Mark’s tendency to tell two stories simultaneously by inserting one story into the middle of the other story (known as intercalations or “sandwiches”) is a unique strategy used by the evangelist and takes some skill to decipher.
Resources
Commentaries: The many volumes in the Berit Olam and Sacra Pagina series.
Literary Techniques in the Bible: Jerome Walsh’s Old Testament Narrative: A Guide to Interpretation. by Jerome Walsh and Mark as Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel by David Rhoads, Joanna Dewey, and Donald Michie (3rd ed.)
Intertextuality: Use footnotes for cross-referencing in any bible.