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THE ENGLISH BIBLE AS LITERATURE

VOL. 1-8

113

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THE ENGLISH BIBLE AS LITERATURE

OME considerations of the Bible as literature may well be added to Canon Barnes's scholarly description of its history.

There are people who demur to the study of the Bible as literature on the ground that the Word of God should be spared this kind of examination. Although it is difficult to take the contention seriously it is necessary to answer it. The best reason for studying the Bible as literature is that it is literature. The books of the Bible have every characteristic of literature, and in the course of time they have been subject to all the adventures and misadventures which beset literary documents.

To consider the Bible as literature is not to neglect, much less to deny, its sacred character. Indeed, those who still accept the doctrine of literal inspiration should be the first to perceive that the Divine method of expression would be itself divine, and that it would consist in using the most beautiful and moving language known to the men to whom it was delivered. If that be so, then the study of the beauty of the Bible as literature is more than relevant to the general study of the Bible as the Word of God.

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The Bible and our National Style

The highest advantage of the study of the Bible as literature is that it enables us, in some real measure, to understand what

the Bible means. Written originally in Hebrew and Greek, painfully and inaccurately copied, doubtfully translated, transmitted to us through a thousand mists of doctrine and prejudice, it is yet still infused with the poetry, the visions, the metaphor, and the folklore of the East, to all of which we are alien. Thus the Bible, of all books, needs a commentary, and until comparatively recent years the kind of commentary which it has most conspicuously lacked is that which Literature alone can supply. "To understand that the language of the Bible is fluid, passing, and literary, not rigid, fixed, and scientific, is the first step towards a right understanding of the Bible," says Matthew Arnold. To read the Bible literally is the way to scepticism; to read it as literature is the way to essential and reasonable belief. Burns knew this when he wrote his "Cotter's Saturday Night." In two stanzas of that beautiful descriptive poem he presents the two great aspects of the English Bible; its messages to the soul and conscience, and its indestructible literary quality. Take them in this order:

The cheerfu' supper done, wi' serious face,
They, round the ingle, form a circle wide;
The sire turns o'er with patriarchal grace,
The big ha' Bible, ance his father's pride:
His bonnet reverently is laid aside,

His lyart happets 1 wearing thin and bare;
Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide,

He wales 2 a portion with judicious care;
And "Let us worship God," he says, with solemn air.

The priest-like father reads the sacred page,
How Abram was the friend of God on high;
Or Moses bade eternal warfare rage

With Amalek's ungracious progeny;

Or how the royal bard did groaning lie
Beneath the stroke of Heaven's avenging ire;
Or Job's pathetic plaint and wailing cry;
Or rapt Isaiah's wild seraphic fire;

Or other holy seers that tune the sacred lyre.

⚫ Lyart happets, grey temples.

a Wales, chooses.

Wycliffe at Lutterworth sending out his "poor preachers" with the translation of the Bible (circa 1378)

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