Modern Genre Theory and the Bible

Andrew Judd unpacks the importance of understanding the conventions of genres as we read the Bible so that we don't get the wrong end of the stick.

I recently received a letter from my bank, politely letting me know that I had missed a payment and would I please attend to this at my convenience. You know the type – you’ve probably received similar letters from time to time.

But imagine that you are an archaeologist 2000 years from now who discovers this letter and tries to understand its meaning. You might begin by carefully interpreting each word of the first line, which begins ‘Dear Andrew’.  You then look up each word in your dictionary. There you will find that ‘dear’ means ‘beloved’ or ‘cherished’. You therefore conclude, reasonably so, that my banker is deeply in love with me.

Nothing, I assure you, could be further from the truth. Where future-archaeologist-you has gone wrong, of course, is in failing to recognise the conventions of the text’s genre—in particular, that the ‘staging structure’ of the formal banking letter genre calls for an opening salutation, which almost always includes the word ‘dear’ as a generic way of addressing the person the letter is to. When the word ‘dear’ appears in this context, no romantic overtones are suggested or implied.

This silly example illustrates some important realities about genre. Genres are conventions we use to make meaning, and your understanding (or misunderstanding) of a genre can dramatically affect what you think the text means. Other conventions of the English language do not change from day to day (even when talking to an Australian), but the conventions of a genre do change from situation to situation, and context to context. What ‘dear’ means depends on whether I am writing a bank letter or a love song. The rules of a eulogy are subtly different to the rules of a standup comedy routine. (If you don’t believe me, try telling jokes at a funeral.) A news article and a political satire can both tell the truth, but in radically different ways. Different genres serve different social functions, and the conventions for how we go about getting things done in each context are different.   

Genre is especially important when reading the Bible. The Bible is a library of books spanning different languages, cultures, historical periods, and, of course, myriad genres. We have songs, sagas, genealogies, historical accounts, novellas, proverbs, apocalypses, letters, lawsuits, erotic poetry, fables, war reports, biographies, parables, and even cooking recipes (see Exodus 30:22). The conventions for each biblical genre vary widely, and have a big influence on the way we interpret the Bible.

For example, I was once in a Bible study where we were studying one of Paul’s letters. The section began, ‘I want you to know, brothers and sisters’. Our group leader highlighted that phrase for us: ‘See how important knowledge is for Paul. He wants us to know . . .’ This was a perfectly reasonable observation to make, but, like future archaeologists reading my bank letter, it would be helpful to know a little about the genre of the ancient letter. Happily, we have thousands of examples of ancient letters. (The University of Michigan has a papyrus collection you can search online.) Reading them, we notice many similarities with Paul’s letters, including some stock phrases for moving between stages of the letter. It turns out that, ‘I want you to know . . .’ is just a very normal way of introducing the next topic of discussion.   

As far as exegetical insights go, this one is far from earth-shattering. But I would suggest that many, if not most, of our big exegetical disagreements over what the Bible means start off life as unspoken assumptions about what the Bible is—its genre. An obvious one concerns the book of Daniel. Is it garden-variety Old Testament prophecy, or is it apocalyptic literature?

Getting the genre of Daniel wrong is a classic way to start a doomsday cult. The nineteenth-century American preacher William Miller, for example, took the book of Daniel as straightforward prophecy. On that basis, he used Daniel 8:14, combined with other Old Testament prophecies, a little basic arithmetic, and a disregard for the wider teaching of Scripture (such as Matthew 24:36) to calculate when the return of Christ would come. He arrived at a date of 22 October 1844. A whole community upended their lives and sat around on that day waiting for Jesus to return to judge the living and the dead. (He did not.)

In contrast, most responsible Bible teachers recognise that to interpret Daniel well we need to become familiar with the rules of the literary game the author is playing. In the centuries before Christ, the genre of apocalypse became very popular with Jewish writers who were in some distress about the state of the world. The genre has its own conventions, including the use of numbers in highly symbolic ways, which means you cannot simply add and subtract the years to put doomsday in your 1844 planner.

Thankfully, we do not need to work out genre on our own. Scholars in the fields of literature, linguistics, and rhetorical studies have developed powerful tools for understanding how genres work. And Bible scholars are slowly starting to abandon outdated ideas about genre (such as ‘form criticism’, a nineteenth-century German approach to genres, which is way too rigid and tends to assume that cultures get less and less sophisticated the further you go back from the nineteenth-century).

The people who wrote the Bible lived a long time ago in very different social contexts. Modern genre theory reminds us that genres are not eternal unchanging realities like the laws of geometry, but they exist in history and culture and are constantly changing. I should not assume that the only right way to write a letter, or tell a story, is the way that we do it in my culture. As we read the Bible, we need to remember that we are guests in someone else’s culture.

Genre Theory in practice: Ben Rae Studying Ecclesiastes

In my research into Ecclesiastes, I have been struck by just how many genres it contains. Within the space of twelve chapters we get narrative, poetry, proverbs, instruction, illustrative stories, and more. 

Yet for many scholars, the idea that a single book can contain such a variety of genres presents a problem. After all, Aristotle described three main literary genres (drama, lyric, and epic) and declared that they should not be mixed. Yet many books of the Bible, like Ecclesiastes, clearly do contain multiple genres. For some scholars, this has been seen as a sign that such books are poorly written, sloppily edited, or contain contradictory strands of thought.

Modern genre theory recognises that this discomfort with the mixing of genres simply does not reflect how texts work or how normal readers think. When The Lord of the Rings shifts from prose to song, it does not mean that the book is somehow suspect or that the songs betray a fundamentally different view of the world from the prose. Rather, it is part of the book’s literary genius and its communicative strategy.

So when it comes to Ecclesiastes, or any other book for that matter, instead of assuming that multiple genres undermine literary coherence, we should be asking ourselves how their presence helps to communicate the message of the book.