Genre, the Lunch Room Cliques of Literature
Genre, the Lunch Room Cliques of Literature
Knowing the rules of a genre can tell us a lot about what we should get out of a text.
I love movie trailers.
When the pacing, music, dialogue, and action all come together in that magical way, it is a work of art.
But a great trailer not only makes you want to see the film, it also sets your expectations. Is the movie funny? Scary? Romantic?
As a joke, there is a video called “Scary Poppins” where a person created a trailer for the classic movie but instead of a light-hearted musical for children, it is presented as a dark horror about a sinister witch who travels on the wind.
Of course, if you were tricked into thinking that some sugar would make medicine taste better, you might agree that it was a horror movie.
When a trailer tells us what type of movie we are going to watch, it is letting us know its genre. This is important because genre sets expectations.
And this is not just true of movies, this is true of any type of story.
The Genre of Genre
John Collins gives a brief definition of genre when he writes, “By ‘literary genre’ we mean a group of written texts marked by distinctive recurring characteristics which constitute a recognizable and coherent type of writing.”1 Genre is, as Duvall and Hays put it, “a fixed agreement between author and reader about how to communicate.”2
Scary stories will be scary. Funny stories will be funny. Mystery stories will be… mystery.
Scripture is no different. However, the challenge we face as readers is that the Bible is not just one genre.
Remember, it is a collection of ancient writings from the Middle East. And this collection is diverse.
The Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament) are often divided into narrative, law, poetry, prophecy, and wisdom3 with narrative being the most common genre.4 Nevertheless, narrative as a category is too broad as it contains various genres within.
Harry Potter and To Kill a Mockingbird are both narratives, but you wouldn’t find them next to each other in a bookstore.
Thus, the question when faced with a narrative is:
What type of narrative is it?
Philip Long shows that the various genres of narratives “are recognized on the basis of generic signals.”5 If a story starts with “once upon a time,” we are expecting to read a fairy tale.
For a biblical example, a parable is a common form used within the gospels, but not every parable is labeled. This requires one to compare a passage with those clearly labeled as a parable for similar markers or styles. Once identified, the reader can understand how best to interpret the story as Craig Bloomberg shows when he states that “Parables, for example, must not be interpreted like straightforward history; although they are very lifelike in many ways, Jesus may have included some details in them simply to make the stories lively and interesting.”6
And here we see why genre helps us on our quest to figure out when a story from Scripture should be viewed as historical or not.
Genre and History
If something is determined as a parable, then it would not be viewed as a historical narrative because the intention of the author would not be to represent something that actually happened.
Or in other words, genre can define if a story is historical or not.
Now before we load this silver bullet into our smoking gun, there is one hiccup, some genres can be used for both fiction and non. A mystery book can use the typical aspects of the mystery genre to describe a real-life conundrum. However, not all hope is lost because when it comes to Scripture, there are genres that determine the historicity of the story.
And here is where we turn to one of my favorite books of the Bible: Jonah.
A Whale of a Tale
Jonah is a unique book. It sits amid the minor prophets, but stylistically stands out among its neighbors.
Jonah openly defies God within the first three verses. Prose, not poetry, constitutes a majority of the writing. An unanswered question ends the tale, and the theme of the text, according to Douglas Stuart, is “don’t be like Jonah.”7
These various aspects cause Kevin Youngblood to conclude that “it is best to read Jonah on its own terms and then relate its distinctive themes to the common motifs of the prophetic literature in general.”8
Jonah’s uniqueness has led to a debate on how it should be classified. The genres put forth for Jonah have been diverse such as history, allegory, parable, legend, satire, didactic fiction, and short story to name a few.9 Indeed, Jonathan Magonet shows how the “absence of consensus on an appropriate descriptive term reflects the difficulty of such an exercise given the limited amount of biblical and extra-biblical materials with which to compare it and the unique character of the book itself.”10
This chaotic confusion creates an opportunity.
By carefully examining possible genres for Jonah, we will learn what it takes to help determine the genre of a book.
Over the next few weeks, we will first look at some of the genres that would require Jonah to be fictional, some that would indicate it should be seen as historical, and tackle the other issue that determines a narrative’s historicity, whether it happened at all.
So What?
As we move forward though, I hope that this brief introduction to genre reveals how we can’t read every part of the Bible the same. By recognizing this fundamental literary truth, we will be able to better grasp what the authors of Scripture are trying to communicate to us.
If we can grasp the basic principles and purposes of a particular genre, we will be better equipped to uncover its meaning. This will lead to us becoming better readers as we will be able to filter out bad interpretations based on genre alone.
To help illustrate this, let’s leave this post with an example of how genre can save us from bad exegesis.
Genesis 1 has been used to try and explain scientifically how the universe was made. The only problem is that its genre is one of ancient creation myth. The ancient creation myth genre indicates the main purpose of such narratives is to depict what type of beings are “the gods” and their relationship to creation.
In other words, this purpose informs us that we should be reading the beginning of Genesis to find out about our God and how He relates to His creation.
Understanding these literary aspects illustrates how a scientific reading fails to pass the genre test.
Again, the Bible is not simple, but that does not mean that it is so convoluted it cannot be understood. The more skilled we become in understanding the literary aspects of scripture, the more we will be able to learn the wonderful truths it has for us.
John J. Collins, “Towards the Morphology of a Genre: Introduction,” Semeia 14 (1979): 1.
J. Scott Duvall and J. Daniel Hays, Grasping God’s Word: A Hands-On Approach to Reading, Interpreting, and Applying the Bible, Third Edition. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012), 151.
Ibid., 150.
Walter C. Kaiser Jr., “‘I Will Remember the Deeds of the Lord’: The Meaning of Narrative,” in Introduction to Biblical Hermeneutics: The Search for Meaning, ed. Walter C. Kaiser Jr. and Moisés Silva (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007), 122
V. Philips Long, The Art of Biblical History, Foundations of Contemporary Interpretation 5 (Leicester: Apollos, 1994), 41.
Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 51.
Douglas Stuart, Hosea–Jonah, vol. 31, Word Biblical Commentary (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1987), 434-435.
Kevin J. Youngblood, Jonah, Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2015), 28.
T. D. Alexander, “Jonah and Genre,” TynBul 36 (1985): 36–37.
Jonathan Magonet, “Jonah, Book Of,” in The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary: H-J (New Heaven: Yale University Press, 1992), 940.