By far the most important of the fine arts in Israel and the early church was the field of literature. The Bible itself is the result of the sensitivity of literary artists to the Spirit of God. Each of the many forms of biblical literature contributes to our understanding of the philosophy of the worship arts.
Literature: Israel’s Enduring Monument
Archaeological excavations reveal that the material culture of ancient Israel was less advanced than that of the Canaanite city-states it displaced. Coming from a seminomadic state as a nation of tent dwellers, the Israelite tribes had no significant tradition of architectural, artistic, or technological innovation, although the nation had artisans such as Bezalel and Oholiab. Even the great temple of Solomon was actually designed and erected by a foreign contractor and reflects Phoenician models; it stood for less than four centuries. Israel left no monumental works of sculpture, art, or architecture to be placed alongside the cultural remains of other ancient civilizations that have survived to our day. The monument of Israel is a literary one: the Bible. It was in the various forms of the literary arts that Israel, including the Israel of the new covenant, excelled.
The literature of the Scriptures is the testimony to a community’s faith. The names of individual authors may be attached to it, and it may bear the distinctive imprint of a personality such as David, Jeremiah, or the apostle Paul. Nevertheless, as literature, it is never the artistic creation of an individual for the purpose of self-expression or recognition. In ancient cultures, the ability to write was a specialized skill, whereas the art of recitation from memory was widely practiced. Most of the Bible existed first in oral form and depended for its survival on a circle of people who memorized it, recited it, and handed it down to successive generations. Isaiah gives us a glimpse of this practice in his remark, “Bind up the testimony, seal the teaching among my disciples” (Isa. 8:16 NASB). Eventually, some major crises in the circle of tradition, such as the insecurities of the period of the fall and exile of Judah, would provide the impetus for writing the material down.
Even in New Testament times the teachings of Jesus and the stories of his acts seem to have circulated orally until the passing of the apostles and the linguistic transition from Aramaic to Greek made it desirable to produce written Gospels for the instruction of the church. In the Gospels we read of “the scribes and Pharisees” (Matt. 5:20 RSV); the scribes were men who had memorized the Mosaic law and the traditions associated with it and who served as a kind of walking concordance or reference Bible for the Pharisaic teachers. The practice of memorizing large portions of the Scripture and the rabbinic traditions continue in Judaism to this day. These procedures of oral transmission in a circle of dedicated people highlight the point that, from the biblical perspective, literature as a form of art belongs to the covenant community as a whole and not to the individual authors who serve as its spokespersons.
Forms of Biblical Literature
The important forms of literature preserved in Scripture can be listed briefly, in order to convey something of the fullness of this form of artistic activity as practiced in the life of the people of the covenant.
History. Historical literature, including chronicle and genealogy, grows out of covenant worship, in which the worshiper confesses his faith by telling the story of God’s dealings with his people. But the narrative and saga of the Hebrew Bible are remarkable in that, while written from a pronounced theological perspective, it often presents a realistic, nonidealized portrait of human leaders such as Abraham, Moses, Samuel, David, and those who followed. The Gospels and the Acts continue the same tradition, portraying Jesus in an authoritative yet convincing manner and his apostles as down-to-earth and familiarly human types. Biblical history shows that God deals with people as he finds them, in whatever circumstance or state of personal growth. God’s openness to people as they are allows the worshiper to come before him honestly, not boasting in his or her own worth but confident of the grace of God as manifested in his great redeeming acts.
Law. Covenant structure also yields the laws or instructions governing the community’s relation to the Great King. The Mosaic Torah contains laws in both the absolute form (“Thou shalt, thou shalt not … ”) and the conditional form (“If this happens, then …, but if this happens, then … ”); the absolute form especially is well adapted to recitation in worship acts of covenant renewal. Jesus’ principles of the kingdom of God are sometimes similarly cast in metrical form, as in the Beatitudes and other parts of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7). The nature of Israelite “law” is often misunderstood; as Torah, it is really “instruction” rather than law in the modern sense of legally binding statutes and belongs in the context of worship rather than that of jurisprudence.
Prophetic Indictment. Equally dependent on the covenant foundation is the basic form of prophetic utterance, the judgment speech (or covenant lawsuit), in which the spokespersons of the Lord utter the consequences of the people’s unfaithfulness to their agreement with him. These indictments, as well as other kinds of prophetic address, are almost always given in poetic and musical form, evidencing considerable artistic reflection on the part of the prophets as they opened themselves to the word of the Lord. The same artistic skill is evident in the Revelation, where John uses a dramatic idiom to amplify the effects of the ruptured covenant.
Poetry. Since a great part of the Bible is poetry, the principles of poetic composition apply to many of the biblical literary forms. As to metrical structure, biblical poetry does not scan in some recurring pattern of metric “feet,” nor does it use rhyme. Instead, it generally employs a rhythm of stressed syllables, with a variable number of intervening unstressed syllables. Such a structure is well adapted to chanting or singing, in a style similar to what we know as the “recitative” in seventeenth-century oratorios such as Handel’s Messiah; most of the poetic material in Scripture was probably originally sung.
The most distinctive feature of biblical poetry, however, is the principle of parallelism of ideas. That is, the second line in a couplet repeats the same idea, using different words (synonymous parallelism); or it may present the contrasting or opposite idea (antithetic parallelism); or it may take the idea of the first line and develop some aspect of its thought (synthetic parallelism). Parallelism in one form or another appears throughout the Bible in poetic or semi-poetic sections such as the Genesis account of Creation, the oracles of the prophets, the Psalms, the Proverbs, and the Sermon on the Mount.
Both the stressed metrical structure and the parallelism of ideas of biblical poetry can be translated into other languages without destroying their character; they are what makes the Bible sound like the Bible in any language. Philosophically speaking, the proper use and appreciation of literature constructed in this way require close attention to the words being used and the images and associations they bear, not only from an intellectual standpoint but also from that of a word artist. The cadence of biblical poetry and hymnody, or even of metrically grouped teachings and commandments, adds to worship a sense of awe and solemnity, lifting it above the plane of the merely prosaic.
Proverb and Wisdom. The biblical proverb, or wise saying, is part of an international tradition of wisdom Israel shared with other cultures of the ancient Near East. Biblical wisdom, however, takes on a distinctive coloration because of the character and sovereignty of Yahweh. The temptation to exalt human wisdom is always tempered by the realization that “there is no wisdom, no insight, no plan that can succeed against the Lord” (Prov. 21:30). Biblical wisdom is therefore practical; it is not the exploration of the esoteric but the consideration of how to live in “the fear of the Lord” (Prov. 9:10). Even the books of Ecclesiastes and Job, which probe the deeper issues of human suffering, eventually come up against the sovereignty of God as the only “answer” to life’s ultimate quest. This literature, too, is thus brought within the orbit of worship, which celebrates the sovereignty of the God of the covenant.
Dialogue. The biblical concept of “truth” is not the modern idea of absolute, scientifically verifiable fact; in Hebraic culture “truth” is created by speaking it, and the most powerful speaker creates the prevailing truth, hence the importance of dialogue as a way of approaching the truth. The best example of this principle is the dialogue of Job, in which Job, his three friends, and Elihu approach the problem of justifying God’s seemingly unjust ways from a variety of angles; if they cannot solve the problem, they can at least talk it to death. However, as the book brings out at the end, the supreme biblical dialogue is always with God, who listens but whose word establishes the final truth. Men and women of the Bible are not afraid to argue with God, to plead with him to change his mind, especially about the execution of his judgments, as we note from the examples of Abraham (Gen. 18:22–33), Moses (Exod. 32:7–14), Amos (Amos 7:1–6), and even Jesus in the garden (Matt. 26:36–44). God expects such a dialogue from his partners in the covenant, and this principle undergirds the teaching of Jesus and the apostles about the importance of prayer.
Parable. Although the parable was an ancient literary form, Jesus brought it to its highest level of artistic development in his parables of the kingdom of God. In these stories, Christ used familiar characters and situations from common life—a farmer sowing seed, a rebellious son, a corrupt judge, a woman who loses a coin, a servant forgiven a great debt, a merchant who discovers a priceless pearl—to illustrate the value of God’s kingdom and the consequences for those who refuse it. A parable is not an allegory, in which every detail stands for some hidden truth; the meaning of Jesus’ parables was quite clear and was offensive to the religious establishment of the time (Luke 20:19). To make its point, the parable depends on the human capacity to imagine and to make a transference of imagery from an ordinary sphere of activity to another, more significant sphere of concern. This must take place in the words and motions of worship, which is therefore highly parabolic.
Drama. In drama, there is a movement from problem to resolution presented in dialogue and action involving complementary and contrasting characters. Biblical history as a whole is a great drama; the problem is the rebellion of humankind, and the resolution is the appearance of the New Jerusalem in which the Lord dwells in the midst of his faithful people. The drama has its ebb and flow, with a hint of the ultimate resolution appearing already in the Lord’s covenant with Abraham. Scripture embraces a more specifically dramatic idiom in several places, particularly at the very culmination in the Revelation to John.
A feature of biblical drama wherever it appears is dynamic imagery in the form of word pictures that convey the sense of movement and energy in the situation. The description of Solomon’s bride (Song of Sol. 4), the four living creatures supporting God’s throne, the sun darkened and the moon turned blood red, fire or stars falling from heaven, the rending of the temple veil, the beasts from the sea and the land, the Word of God with the sword, a city coming down from heaven—these are images intended to propel and intensify the drama. As literary symbols, they are powerful and gripping. Reduced to visual form, as though literal, they lose their compelling power and become merely grotesque or even trite. Biblical drama builds with word pictures; the cross of Christ itself is such a word picture, an instrument of execution transferred through preaching (not visual representation) into a symbol of victory and the renewal of the covenant. Biblical worship is the enactment of the imaged resolution to the great drama of Scripture. The loaf and the cup of the Eucharist are powerful not as visual symbols, but as dramatic symbols, an acted-out word picture of the presence of the living Christ with his people. Perhaps more than any other literary form, drama brings the worshiper into the realm of the numinous and that communion with the holy that fulfills the chief end and aim of humankind: to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.