THE OLD TESTAMENT NARRATIVES: THEIR PROPER USE
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW:
- The single most common type of biblical literature is narrative, which are purposeful stories retelling the historical events of the past that are intended to give meaning and direction for a given people in the present.
- Instead of concentrating on the clear meaning of the narrative, some relegate the text to merely reflecting another meaning beyond the text. This is know as allegorizing.
- Ignoring the full historical and literary contexts, and often the individual narrative, some people concentrate on small units only and thus miss interpretational clues, called decontextuallizing.
- Basic narrative parts: characters, plot, plot resolution.
- Metanarrative: the whole universal plan of God worked out through his creation and focusing primarily on God's chosen people.
- Distinctive features of Hebrew narratives: narrator, scenes, characters, dialogue, plot, and structure.
- Implicit teaching: narrative teaching that is clearly present in the story but not stated in so many words.
- Moralizing: in asking "what is the moral of this story?, this approach involves the assumption that principals for living can be derived from all passages.
- Misappropriation: closely related to personalizing, it is to appropriate a narrative for purposes that are quite foreign to it's reason for being there.