There are many angles that can be pursued when thinking about the Bible as literature, but two bedrock questions underlie any discussion of the subject. Those two qu…

For twenty centuries, the Bible has been the preeminent book in Western culture. It still holds that position in English-speaking countries and cultures, though not to th…

Every time we sit down to interact with a passage from the Bible, four ingredients converge. One is the written text. This, in turn, is the product of an author, so if we ar…

As an epigraph for my address I have chosen a comment about the Bible that the Russian novelist Dostoyevsky put into the mouth of one of his fictional characters: “W…

My aim in this address is to make the case that literary criticism can make significant contributions to how biblical scholars handle the Bible. The context in which I make…

I have been invited to make the case for a literary approach to the Bible, and I want to do so with an appropriate humility but also with an appropriate confidence that w…

The Bible is not a totally unique book. In general, its literary forms function in the same way that these forms function beyond the Bible. A story is a story, whether in the…

The idea of the Bible as literature did not begin in the modern era. As I have plied my trade as a spokesman for the Bible as literature for half a century, I have adopted …

Before we can embrace a literary approach to the Bible with enthusiasm, we of course need to be relieved of anxieties about viewing the Bible as literature. Resistance t…

My aim in this address is to think with you about the nature of the Bible we believe and proclaim. To give my remarks an argumentative edge, I have entitled them…

Bridging the gap between the biblical world and our own world involves a two-way journey. The way to Hometown is through Jerusalem. A companion essay to this one…