Discovering the Beauty and Artistry of Biblical Storytelling

The idea of writing down our thoughts is nothing particularly novel for you and I .The whole idea of the literarily artistry involved in reading and writing is long gone. Today paper is cheap. We write shopping lists, or copy down addresses on bits of paper. Of course we don’t expect to win Nobel prizes for literature. We just keep writing, throwing away, and deleting.

When we approach the Bible stories it is different. They require a sense of the involved literary artistry. Ideally, we should all be able to read the Bible in its original languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek). That way we would catch the beauty and careful design of the Bible stories.

The biblical authors, after having received the divine revelation, did not just sit down and start writing or boot up the laptop and start blogging. They were awed by their task. I wonder if they knew that they were writing for time and for eternity.

They sat down and before bringing ink to parchment carefully planned their words. Some of them were well educated (like Isaiah, a member of the royal family whose literary mastery is quite obvious – even in English); others cut a simple prose (not having had the privilege of a “college” education).

The Bible is not always an easy read for lazy 21st century readers. It does not have the literary forms that we are used to but, the Bible can be interesting, exciting, thought provoking and life changing.

In order to get the most from our Bible reading we need to pay attention to the building blocks of the story. In the next two blogs we will look at some of the most important building blocks for Biblical stories….

Why do we like stories so much? What makes a good story?

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